Fate or fluke? Air crash sole survivors

Ruben van Assouw will probably spend the rest of his life wondering why he survived and no one else did. Hopefully it will be a long happy life for him and the reason he survived will be made clear as he grows older.

The problem with stories like this is there is always someone wondering why other people died and they lived. Why did a tornado skip one house but wipe out the rest of the street or a hurricane cause a tree to crash into a house right after the people living there walked out of the room? Why does a car accident happen right after we were right there instead of when we were there. Surviving can be a blessing but there is always that question of "why" popping up all the time and then comes wondering if your survival meant that much in the long run.

Divine intervention? Luck? Guardian Angels? Karma? Why do some seriously ill people suddenly heal and others pass away seemingly too fast? Why does someone live through a plane crash when everyone else on the plane died? There are so many questions we may never know the answers to but each day there are chances to live our lives differently for having survived it and ended up saved.

Fate or fluke? Air crash sole survivors
By Barry Neild, CNN
May 13, 2010 8:13 p.m. EDT

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Dutch boy lone survivor after escaping air crash with broken bones
Only a few dozen people have become lone air crash survivors
Many survival stories reveal remarkable feats of endurance

(CNN) -- Some will see it as divine intervention, others a simple quirk of fate, fortune or physics, but one boy's cheating of death in an air crash in Libya this week adds another name to a small roll call of aviation disaster sole survivors.

The boy, identified as Ruben van Assouw, suffered multiple fractures in his lower limbs when the Afriqiyah Airways Airbus A330-200 crashed Tuesday at Tripoli International Airport killing 92 passengers and a crew of 11.

Details of how Assouw, a Dutch national, emerged alive from such an appalling disaster are not yet known, but his survival has already been called a "miracle" by Jerzy Buzek, president of the European Parliament.

Statistically improbable, the fact of his survival is also unlikely to shed any light on the mysterious factors that increase the chances of escaping alive from a plane wreck.
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Air crash sole survivors