Staunton's theory is concerning the crashing of
trains and
planes of such. He took
statistics from over fifty plane crashes since
1925 and over two hundred train crashes since
1900. He fed all the data into a
computer. Basically, he was correlating three factors: those present on any such conveyance that met with
disaster, those killed, and the capacity of the
vehicle. Then he fed a second series of figures into the computer - this time an equal number of planes and trains which didn't meet with disaster.
His results were simple but quite staggering - full planes and trains rarely crash.
That was Staunton's theory and the computer bore him out. In cases where planes and trains crash, the vehicles are running at 61 per cent capacity, as regards passenger loads. In cases where they didn't the vehicles are running at 76 per cent which is a difference of 15 per cent over a large computer run, and that sort of across - the - board deviation is significant.
For example: Your Aunt Sally gets a stomach ache just before Flight 61 takes off from Gatwick bound for L.a. and when the plane crashes everyone says "Oh Aunt Sally that stomach was really the grace of God" But until Staunton came along no one knew that there were really thirty people with stomach aches or headaches or that funny feeling yoou get in your legs when your body is trying to tell your head that something is getting ready to go way off-course.