Runways Confusing

“You’ve got these runway lights, and you are looking at them, and they’re saying: ‘Come to me, come to me. I will let you land.’ They’re like the sirens of the ocean.”
 — I was talking to a friend the other night and I brought up my embarrassing but shockingly firm superstitious belief that we are all born with so many airline flights to our name and when we reach our appointed number that is when our plane goes down. It’s an absurd theory on its face — the idea that not only is there some higher agency which controls our fate but that it also keeps a ledger of our travel arrangements — but still, every time I am about to board a plane I wonder, “Is my number up?” (I wonder this more in the spirit of hope than fear.) Anyway, this quote above, from “a former Air Force pilot who teaches aviation safety at the University of Southern California” in response to a report showing that commercial airline pilots might have a hard time figuring out which actual airport they should be landing at, does not exactly make me feel much more confident about aviation safety. But I guess we’re all gonna die one way or another.