When Superstition Takes Flight

Here’s a fun little fact you might not have noticed while awkwardly shimmying past row 12 with your elbows and dignity barely intact: there is no row 13 on most airplanes. Which I just got reminded of when I went back home for the weekend. Airplanes, those sleek, efficient machines of science and logic, routinely skip a number. Not for structural reasons. Not for legroom. But because it’s unlucky. We’ll trust aerospace engineers to design a machine that carries us across oceans atin tremendous heights, but sitting in row 13? Absolutely not. That’s a step too far, apparently.

It’s funny because the logic breaks down the second you think about it. The fear is that sitting in row 13 will bring you bad luck. As if misfortune is up there in the clouds somewhere, scanning the seat map, ready to ruin your flight only if you dared to sit in that row. If a plane goes down (don’t worry, statistically, it won’t), it’s not like the Grim Reaper is knocking politely on row 13 while everyone else gets a complimentary safe landing. Flying is one of the only situations in life where luck is truly collective: either everyone makes it, or no one does.
And yet, there’s something deeply human about this irrational pause in the otherwise hyper-rational process of flying. We board planes based on gate numbers, boarding zones, and departure times to the minute, but we still flinch at a two-digit number with a bad connotation. It’s a small superstition in a metal sky-bus held up by physics and hope.

Airlines don’t really mind. Removing row 13 doesn’t cost them anything. If anything, it saves them a few customer service complaints and awkward glances from nervous flyers. And for the rest of us, it’s a strange little comfort. A reminder that even as we trust in science to carry us across oceans, we’re still a little bit ruled by story, by ritual, by habit. We are, after all, just some silly little humans. So next time you fly, look for the gap between rows 12 and 14. There, in that little absence, is a piece of humanity, and maybe, just maybe, the real reason we all need the tiny bottle of wine.