Airlines permanently retire the flight numbers of crashed airplanes in a superstitious effort to make passengers forget that hundreds of people died on that exact route.

A closer look

Airlines permanently retire the flight numbers of crashed airplanes in a superstitious effort to make passengers forget that hundreds of people died on that exact route. You will never board an American Airlines Flight 11 or a Pan Am Flight 103, because corporate executives know that human psychology is deeply fragile and easily spooked by numbers associated with fiery metal debris. It is a grim, unwritten rule of the aviation industry to simply sweep the cursed digits under the rug and slap a fresh new number on the route the very next day. They expect us to happily drink our complimentary ginger ale and ignore the fact that the only reason our boarding pass says Flight 402 is because Flight 401 spectacularly nosedived into a swamp!