How not to Think about Probability: Malaysia plane edition [View all]

[cthulu2016]

Massive search for Malaysia plane yields no evidence; experts speculate on pilot suicide

... In a vacuum of evidence about what went wrong aboard the flight, speculation turned to the possibility of pilot suicide, an extraordinarily rare occurrence.

...There have been two cases in recent years in which a pilot or crew member is believed to have intentionally caused a plane to crash: the disaster involving SilkAir Flight 185, which spiraled into the ground in Indonesia in 1997, killing 97 passengers and seven crew members; and the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990, which plunged into the Atlantic south of Nantucket in 1999, killing 217 people.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/debris-may-be-from-mssing-malaysia-airlines-flight/2014/03/10/2669f16a-a822-11e3-b61e-8051b8b52d06_story.html

A passenger jet with 100, 200 people crashing and killing everyone aboard is a rare occurrence. The great majority of planes arrive at their destination without killing any passengers.

When, however, a passenger jet dives into the ocean with no distress signal it is not extraordinarily rare that the pilot did it intentionally... it has happened twice in recent years.

It is extraordinarily rare to have a flipped coin come up heads twenty times in a row. In cases where it has already come up 19 times in a row, however, the odds of making it to 20 are exactly 50-50.

Total loss of a jet from birds flying into the engines is extraordinarily rare among all flights, since the great majority of flights don't crash at all, but not really all that uncommon among the very small population of large jets that fall right out of the sky shortly after take-off.

What is really rare is for a plane to fly into the ocean without any hint of distress. And when something that atypical happens, the explanation of the very atypical event is almost always going to be atypical.

I have no idea what happened to the plane. Pilot suicide is one of many possibilities, each of which is unusual. If the wings just fell off, or terrorists blew it up those would be as unusual as pilot suicide... things that happen from time to time.