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Celebrity 'It Should Have Been Me...'

McAvennie

Justified & Ancient
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Supposedly, according to sources on Wikipedia, SA Foreign Minister Pik Botha, The Four Tops, Sex Pistol John Lydon, tennis pro Mats Wilander and actress Kim Cattrall were all booked on the Lockerbie Pan Am flight.

Seeing that reminded me of stories about 9/11. Jackie Chan was supposed to be filming at the WTC that day, swimmer Ian Thorpe was on his way there but forgot his camera and returned to his hotel, Fergie had a meeting scheduled there, Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane and actor Mark Wahlberg were supposedly booked on one of the 9/11 flights.

I recall that Italian footballer Christian Panucci was supposed to be booked on TWA Flight 800 in 1996, and that comedian Neil Fitzmaurice (Phoenix Nights, Peep Show) was at Hillsborough. Presumably Titanic must have a fair few 'I missed it' stories from rich or celebrity passengers.

The initial Pan Am flight was a pre-Xmas flight to NY so it is feasible that it could have been loaded with a fair few celebrities, but still... that is quite a roster of stars.

Is it just that we hear celebrities stories of brushes with disaster? Or is there a case of elaborating stories for attention? A lot of these cases seem to be confirmed but others fall into the 'undetermined' category on Snopes.
 
I want to know how so many of them can still miss the bloody plane, even with assistants and drivers and all the rest of it. Does this show that if you make an appointment with some "celebs", you might end up being dicked about.
 
McAvennie,

sounds interesting, have you any links to reliable articles?
 
colinbaker32 said:
McAvennie,

sounds interesting, have you any links to reliable articles?

Some are from the horse's mouth, some are not...

Jackie Chan - http://www.snopes.com/rumors/jackchan.asp
"Filming was scheduled to have taken place at 7am last Tuesday morning, and as I had to be at the top of one of the towers for one of the scenes, I would probably have died if the shooting went aead as planned!"

Seth McFarlane - http://www.tvshowsondvd.com/articles/seth.cfm
"I was booked on that flight and I was drinking the night before and hung over and I missed the plane by about 10 minutes. It was a very close call for me."

Mark Wahlberg - http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1590386,00.html
"You were supposed to be on a morning flight out of Boston on 9/11. Why didn't you go?
I left Boston a week earlier. My friends and I decided to charter a plane and go up to Canada to go to see a friend's film at the Toronto Film Festival."

Sarah Ferguson - http://www.contactmusic.com/news.nsf/story/screenwriter-recalls-fergies-911-horror_1024763

Kim Cattrall - http://www.contactmusic.com/news.nsf/story/cattralls-plane-crash-near-escape_1034625

Mats Wilander - http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/09/sports/09iht-arena_ed3__1.html
"Tennis no longer seemed to be worth his full attention, a realization certainly helped along by the sobering fact that Wilander reserved but did not take a seat on Pan Am 103, the flight that was blown up in midair by Libyan terrorists over Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1988."

John Lydon - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/3511133.stm
""We only missed the flight because Nora hadn't packed in time. We had a big row and then took the next flight out."

Neil Fitzmaurice - http://www.mirror.co.uk/celebs/news...ny-of-new-tv-thriller-s-star-115875-18754503/

Pik Botha - http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/1999/apr/07/lockerbie.patrickbarkham
"The German newspaper Die Zeit claimed that the South African foreign minister, Pik Botha, intended to fly on Pan Am 103 but had been warned off. Mr Botha flew on an earlier flight, Pan Am 101, which, unlike flight 103, had special security checks at Heathrow. No one has been able to definitively confirm or refute the Die Zeit story."

Christian Panucci - http://www.123football.com/players/p/christian-panucci/index.htm
"In 1996, Panucci was incredibly lucky to avoid death. He was part of the Italy squad at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, but had to leave the team due to injury. Panucci was scheduled to leave the United States on TWA Flight 800 that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. But a last-minute change of flight plans saved his life."
 
There is some truth in these stories but I think in many cases some peoples path takes them very close to the time and place of a disaster, and they ask temselves if they could have been caught up in it if things had happened differently.

Many people could just have easily gone somewhere a day earlier or a day later and then over time their story becomes "I was going to be their on that day but by chance I went aq day later".
 
colinbaker32 said:
There is some truth in these stories but I think in many cases some peoples path takes them very close to the time and place of a disaster, and they ask temselves if they could have been caught up in it if things had happened differently.

Many people could just have easily gone somewhere a day earlier or a day later and then over time their story becomes "I was going to be their on that day but by chance I went aq day later".

Yep, that is my feeling. Lots of legitimate nearlys but very few actual real close calls.
 
I heard Seth MacFarlane interviewed about his September 11th brush with death, and when he says it was a close call, you'd better believe it.
 
This topic overlaps with stories of non-celebs who might have been at a disaster scene, but had some kind of vague premonition and so changed their plans at the last minute.

We probably already have threads on these (I may do a Search later), but off the top of my head I seem to remember the Titanic and Aberfan being involved.

Somebody once did some research that showed that trains involved in serious accidents carried fewer passengers than normal at that time of day, suggesting that humans have some slight premonitions of disaster, whether consciously or subconciously. So missing a train (plane, ship, etc..) you should have caught might have been due to your subconscious acting on a psychic tip-off of trouble ahead.
 
My first wife (we divorced, she's not dead!) was catching a ferry accross the channel on the day of the Zeebrugge disaster. She was due to travel later than the Herald of Free Enterprise (that was it wasn't it?) so wouldn't have got caught up in it. I still lended up frantically phoning up.

A friend of mine goes on a lot of holdays and has done for years. He has had two really scary moments. Once was when they were taking off from Los Angeles and the plane had to drop altitude dramatically and quickly to avoid a collision with another plane. They only found out once thay had got off! But he will always remember having to pick his stomach from the ceiling. He has also been in a plane that overshot a runway and they ended up in a sand pit!
 
Spudrick68 said:
Once was when they were taking off from Los Angeles and the plane had to drop altitude dramatically and quickly to avoid a collision with another plane. They only found out once thay had got off!

Something like that happened when I was on a flight to Barcelona.
The plane climbed suddenly and very steeply. I just happened to look out of the window and I saw a plane passing some way below us.
Nobody panicked, there was no announcement or anything - so I think they kept it quiet. For all I know, I may have been the only passenger on that flight who knew what was happening.
 
Leaving Tokyo a few years back we were taxiing to get onto the runway when the plane seemed to stop very suddenly with a jolt, as I looked out the window a large 747 came whooshing in to land on the runway in front of my plane. For all I know the jolty stop was entirely planned and there was never any danger but for a while I was left wondering if I had nearly been on the verge of a Tenerife style disaster. Probably not, but rare are such flirtations with tragedy that I guess even halfway-close scenarios take on a mythical form in one's mind over the years.
 
jimv1 said:
I often think that if the guy reviewing Adolf Hitler's art portfolio had had a better day, recent history would have been entirely different.

If Postman Princip had been able to look after his kids and not had to send young Gavrilo off to Zagreb...
 
In one of Stephen King's novels he talks about this (I want to say The Stand but I might be wrong) and he says that statistically no plane that has ever crashed was completely full. For every accident/plane crash there were always less passangers on board than there should have been. He puts it down to precognition.

I always wondered that myself - I remember reading about the Dunblane massacre and there were three children IIRC who didn't attend school that day as they felt unwell and I've always personally believed it was precognition.
 
What about the AF4590 concorde crash in 2000. That was packed to the rafters with german OAPs?

It was full basically...
 
colinbaker32 said:
What about the AF4590 concorde crash in 2000. That was packed to the rafters with german OAPs?

It was full basically...

Reverse precognition? They wanted out and were unconsciously drawn to a means to their end...?
 
Little_grey_lady said:
In one of Stephen King's novels he talks about this (I want to say The Stand but I might be wrong) and he says that statistically no plane that has ever crashed was completely full. For every accident/plane crash there were always less passangers on board than there should have been. He puts it down to precognition.

Could also put it down to more mundane factors.

Air travel is a lot more 'difficult', with most out of town you will have traffic jams to negotiate en route, queues at check-in, queues at security - there are far more ways to be held up and to miss your flight than say a train or boat journey.

You generally have to book, there is far less just turning up on the day like a train. Thus every plane will have people who missed passengers or those who had booked tickets but did not fly. Whereas on a train far fewer book their seat and would rather just turn up and catch the next available.

Not ruling out the precognition theory but I think there are other factors to consider as well.
 
I've heard airlines oversell flights on the basis that there are always absent passengers.
 
I vaguely remembered reading an article online about the Harrow and Wealdstone rail crash of 1952 and that someone had a premonition about it. After a bit of digging I found the article, and it's actually someone commenting on it who reports that her mother encountered a man who had had a premonition about the crash.

The article (which is well written and quite interesting (at least if you have and interest in the railways)) is here.

The comment reads:

MUM OF TWINS6 March 2017 at 12:48
My late Mum was at Harrow Wealdstone station that fateful morning on her way to work in Railway accounts offices in St Pancras Chambers, she was met with a collegue, white as a sheet, running out of the station, he said he didnt know why but he just had to get away totally panicked, sixth sense?
Minutes later the disaster occured, Mum having been a nurse during the war offered her services & spent the day helping victims.
She would never say much about it but i know it affected her greatly & i imagine it haunted her everytime she went on a train.
 
Presumably Titanic must have a fair few 'I missed it' stories from rich or celebrity passengers.

This happens to more ordinary people too. A lady I used to look after as a carer told me her father in law'd been booked on the Titanic to start a new life in America with his brother, but missed the sailing because of a hangover. Brother went, future Father in Law didn't, and Brother was lost in the disaster.
 
l had a premonition that something had happened/would happen”, said a woman, after every incident, ever.

maximus otter
 
Not quite on topic, but I often try to "tune in" when boarding a Tube train, to see if there's something telling me to wait for the next one. And then, once on board, I wonder if the train I'm on was the one that got away just in time...
 
Back in 1980s London I worked in "The City" as a bond trader and was walking to work early one morning (we used to start work around 7am) when a heavy metal hammer crashed to the ground about 15 feet directly in front of me having fallen from scaffolding.

Just before it happened one of my favourite tracks had started playing on my Sony Walkman and I had stopped briefly to turn the volume up on my headphones.

That brief pause kept me out of harm's way.

Now is that precognition, luck or none of the above?
 
Back in 1980s London I worked in "The City" as a bond trader and was walking to work early one morning (we used to start work around 7am) when a heavy metal hammer crashed to the ground about 15 feet directly in front of me having fallen from scaffolding.

Just before it happened one of my favourite tracks had started playing on my Sony Walkman and I had stopped briefly to turn the volume up on my headphones.

That brief pause kept me out of harm's way.

Now is that precognition, luck or none of the above?
What was the track? Was it 'If I Had a Hammer'?
 
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