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The Travel Detective

The Travel Detective: Superstitions on Planes

Locations in this article:  Dallas, TX Las Vegas, NV

You won’t find gate 13 at Las Vegas International Airport. Passengers don’t want to jinx their luck there. The same holds true at many airports around the world.

Aviation and travel are filled with superstitions. Most travelers know flying is statistically safer than driving, but there’s still unease for many passengers when metal machines defy gravity.

Flight attendants greeting passengers at the front of planes say they observe all kinds of superstitious habits from tapping and kissing the plane to jigs and dances in the jetway.

People do it once and the flight gets there safely. And so, they figure they better keep doing it, right? Most airlines never use 13 and 911 for flight numbers.

And tradition holds that the flight numbers of crashed planes are never used again. Both American Airlines and Delta Air Lines have suffered crashes of Flight 191, and neither uses that number anymore.

Of the 102 airlines tracked by Seatguru.com, 25 around the world have no row 13 on their planes.

There are exceptions to superstitions, of course.

Here at Dallas Love Field Airport, you will find gate 13. If you happen to be superstitious and flying out of this gate, you just have to go with it.

To promote good luck, Southwest Airlines has flight 711 to Las Vegas. And other airlines put lucky numbers on Las Vegas flights too.

In addition to 13, most airlines avoid using 666, the biblical “number of the beast.”

But Finnair goes the other way and seemingly tempts fate with one of its flights to Helsinki, Finland. The flight from Copenhagen, Denmark has been operating for years as 666. And since the airport code for Helsinki is “h-e-l,” well, you guessed it–it’s flight 666 to hell.

By Scott McCartney for PeterGreenberg.com