Did the phone start ringing off the hook last Friday from clients who had fallen victim to bad luck? It shouldn’t have, and there are statistics to prove that Friday the 13th is, if anything, safer than the average Friday.
A recent study by the Dutch Centre for Insurance Statistics (CVS) reveal that fewer accidents and reports of fire and theft occur when the 13th of the month falls on a Friday than on other Fridays.
"I find it hard to believe that it is because people are preventatively more careful or just stay home,” CVS statistician Alex Hoen told a Dutch insurance magazine, “but statistically speaking, driving is a little bit safer on Friday 13th.”
In the last two years, Dutch insurers received reports of an average 7,800 traffic accidents each Friday, the CVS study said. But the average figure when the 13th fell on a Friday was just 7,500.
There were also fewer incidents of fire and theft, although the average value of losses on Fridays 13th was slightly higher.
Even the friendly skies show Friday 13th gets a bad rap.
According to the Aviation Safety Network database, which contains all known fatal airliner accidents there have been a total of 2,288 fatal airliner accidents on passenger flights from January 1, 1945 up to and including Friday 13, September, 2013. This translates to an average of 91 fatal accidents per day.
During the same period there were 118 “Friday 13th” days during which eight fatal airliner accidents were recorded, an average of 67 per day, fewer than the so-called “lucky” days.
