Man missed doomed Ethiopia flight by 2 minutes

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/03/12/man-missed-doomed-ethiopia-fli.html

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Unfortunately, … Fortunately, …

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You can’t escape your destiny

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That’s got to be a roller-coaster of emotion ending in survivor’s guilt.

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Reminds me of the guy* who said “My dad was nearly President of the United States – he was the captain of PT-108 during the war.”

* Perhaps an apocryphal guy, I don’t know.

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Go play the lottery dude; you’re walking around ‘lucky.’

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The story should stay on point, about those people who died, and what is needed to prevent a similar accident.

What about the people who just made the flight by two minutes?

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They can’t be helped now, and there’s very little meaningful commentary beyond “This was awful!” and “I sure hope they figure out what went wrong!” that we can say about the accident until the investigation proceeds and we learn more.

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This is his story

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There is no luck. There is just randomness. And I can’t help but be amused by people saying he should thank God, when that God just let 149 people die in a plane crash. Maybe instead, he should talk to someone who can help his survivor’s guilt not fuck him up too much.

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To be fair, they were telling him to stop protesting that he was missing his meetings. He could have missed the rest of his life.

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Agreed; this is the human interest aspect of a horrible tragedy.
If comments about the guy missing his flight were posted in the other thread about the accident itself, then they would not be “on point.”

How depressing and utterly pointless life would be, if I believed that.

As it stands, I like Stephen King’s take on it; some things in existence are part of the Purpose, and some things are part of the Random, and pretty much all of it is beyond our understanding as ‘Short Timers.’

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I agree that such a worldview is comforting. Fantasy often is.

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Yeah, “God”… what about the ~150 people that made the fucking flight? Good job, god, you’re a real winner.

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How needlessly snide of you.

Everyone needs something to keep them going in life; sadly, for far too many people in this world, it seems to be perpetually shitting on everyone who’s not them.

Regarding “luck” or just being thankful for not dying, there was a relevant line in Fight Club, after the guy who’d wanted to be a vet was accosted by “Jack’s” psychosis/alter-ego;

"Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of his life. His breakfast will taste better than any meal you and I have ever tasted."

I’d say that’s probably now true for Antonis Mavropoulos; perhaps all the more so, because his near miss was not precipitated by another person.

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Reminds me of Seth MacFarlane. He was 10 minutes late for boarding American Airlines Flight 11 on the morning of 9/11.

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anderson-cooper-eyeroll

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