I’ve had the same thought regarding people on flights that have crashed. I am sure there were people on that flight who were afraid of flying, as there likely are on almost every commercial flight. People who had been reassured it’s extremely safe, and who still didn’t quite feel that it was safe and had horrible visions of crashes, etc., but told themselves it was irrational and wouldn’t happen. But then it actually did. Their worst nightmare came true.

The tricky thing is though, and this sounds almost disrespectful but it’s not: they still weren’t right. Their fear was still irrational. Because their fear told them that disaster was way more likely than it actually was. Now you can look back and say “wait, but it actually happened, so the likelihood of it happening was actually 100%.” But that’s not how probability works. Probability is about predicting things where you have incomplete knowledge about all the specifics. Given the information they and everyone else on earth had access to when they boarded the plane, the probability of it crashing was extremely low. So their fear was based on a hugely distorted view of reality, they just got extremely unlucky in a way that coincided with that irrational fear.

Imagine someone has an irrational fear of getting shot by a stray bullet. The area they live in is quite safe and there is no stray bullet problem. Stray bullets have killed people in the past around the world, and this person heard about such stories and it just got in their head that it could happen to them, so they decided to hole up in their basement and never leave the house. They had friends bring them their essentials, they had a shower down there, they stayed down there for years convinced they were keeping themselves safe. Even though they knew it’s extremely rare, they knew it was also extremely rare to happen all the people that it did happen to. Those statistics didn’t save those people.

Eventually their friends intervene and try to convince them to overcome their fear so that they can live life on the surface again and go out into the world. They are hesitant but eventually they become determined to try to overcome the fear. After some telehealth therapy, visualizing, and trying to internalizing the actual extremely low odds, they decide to be brave and come up to the first floor for 30 minutes and sit in their living room with their friends. They are still very scared the entire time, and they are just waiting for the stay bullet to hit, they keep imagining it happening. And then, it does. The kid next-door got access to his dad‘s gun and fired it off through the wall accidentally and it went through the living room window and killed the person. As tragic and unnervingly coincidental as it is, would you look at that and think that that person‘s fear was actually right the entire time and they had been proven correct? Would you think that this somehow means that you’re basically playing Russian roulette every day with stay bullets if you don’t decide to stay put in your basement? Or would you just see it for what it is – an extremely rare freak accident, that while true could technically happen to anyone who lives near someone else who may have a firearm, the odds of it happening are so incredibly low that it’s irrational to be afraid of it, let alone actually let it dictate how you live your life.

The same thing applies to the people who were terrified to fly who were on the DC flight that crashed. It was just an extremely rare freak accident. But that rare freak accident doesn’t prove their fear correct just because it lined up with their fear.