You’d have been a brave person to board this plane.
You might not consider yourself a superstitious person, walking on cracks like there’s no slabs, buying black cats, not touching wood after jinxing a match win. But we are a nation of believers, whether in GAA curses or never cutting down a Hawthorn tree and despite buildings over 12 storeys being infrequent in Ireland, many of them omit the 13th floor button on an elevator and just call it 14.
Rarely however is the battle between science and the spiritual so numerically interrogated as it was on this flight to Helsinki that landed yesterday.
On Friday the 13th, the Finnair flight 666 took off at 13.00, heading for HEL airport. If that coincidence of numerology wasn’t enough to terrify the satanic out of you, the airplane was 13 years old.
The Finnish aren’t a superstitious people and this particular flight anomaly has happened a few times since 2002, inevitably causing some joyful predictions of calamity from the public.
✈️️ Finnair flight 666, at 13 o'clock on Friday the 13th with a 13 year old aircraft, has landed safely in HELhttps://t.co/0kWfkcARmO pic.twitter.com/OPvpyyq4F4
— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) January 13, 2017
The passengers on board the flight which took off from Copenhagen, must have had not have had triskaidekaphobia, which is of course, the fear of the number 13, which of course we just found out by googling it.
And if you’re looking for some more extensively long words with more syllables than a game of charades, Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia is the name for the phobia of the number 666, while the fear of Friday the 13th is called Paraskevidekatriaphobia, which comes from the Greek paraskeví (meaning ‘Friday’), and dekatria (meaning ‘thirteen’).
There is plenty of obscure terminology and time to insert those phobias into your everyday vernacular and be ready for the next Friday the 13th in October 2017.
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