At around midday on 19 August 1949, wreathed in thick mist, a British European Airways DC-3 going from Belfast to Manchester flew into a hillside on Saddleworth Moor in the Peak District, near Oldham. All the crew and 21 of the 29 passengers died on impact or soon afterwards. Eight passengers survived, including a young boy and his parents, although, devastatingly, their younger child was one of the fatalities. That surviving boy became my friend and statistical colleague, Prof Stephen Evans.
I think we would agree that Stephen was lucky. But what do we mean by “luck”? We might say that someone has been lucky, or unlucky, if they have benefited or been harmed by something that was unpredictable and beyond their control. Luck has been called “the operation of chance, taken personally”.
