A woman who survived the Air France flight 447 crash only by missing the plane has died in a car accident. Devon Sawa was unavailable for comment.
I’ve always been fascinated by the stories of people who avoid death because of their own lateness, and every time I get on a plane I wonder if I should have been late for this particular flight (while I fly a lot – in 2007, for instance, I flew the circumference of the Earth – I hate it and it terrifies me). Air disasters always raise the specter of fate because the moment those plane doors are sealed you are losing all control of your destiny. The concept that you do not make your own future becomes stark reality once you’re in a metal tube that is hurling itself towards your eventual destination – final or otherwise.
It’s one of the reasons why the Final Destination films work so well. Granted, it’s a secondary or tertiary reason after the fun, gory kills and the beautiful young people, but like all truly successful horror films, the Final Destination movies tap into a real vein of fear. It’s the fear that no matter what actions you take, you’re on a collision course with your own mortality. And that’s essentially true – we’re all going to die – but for some it’s more true.
One of those is Johanna Ganthaler, who was on vacation in Brazil with her husband and who missed 447. Death caught up with her on a road in Austria, and she was killed when their car veered across the road and smashed into a truck. Her husband may have cheated death twice now – he was seriously injured in the crash but, as of this writing, still alive. We’ll see if a toaster mysteriously finds its way into his bath tub, or if he is killed in a freak dry cleaning accident or something.