lindsvedotnet

I took a round trip to Copenhagen yesterday for a meeting with our thesis supervisor. Although I drove from home as early as 4:45 in the morning I noticed something weird during the flight to Copenhagen - seat row no. 13 was missing? I found this a little bit weird, but didn’t think much of it until later that evening when we flew back home again. Neither of the two airplanes used on the flights home had a seat row no. 13 either, and that was when I really found this weird.

I have been trying to figure it out today with a little bit of googling, but this mystery is still unresolved to me.

UPDATE (05/31/06): I had another round trip to Copenhagen this monday. When we used the self-service check-in kiosk and were about to select our seating on the plane from Oslo to Trondheim, we noticed that the plane had a seat row #13. It didn’t have any available seats though so we did select some other row. After getting aboard the plane we could confirm that the seat row #13 was there, and our quest for the missing seat row was to end.

During the flight I flipped through the SAS Braathens flight magazine, and in the Q&A section I found the same question, asking for seat row #13. The answer from the carrier company was the same as suggested in the comment from Bendik; it’s superstition. The question in the magazine had a twist though, because the former SAS planes (SAS and Braathens are two flight carriers that merged in Scandinavia) didn’t have the 13th seat row, but the former Braathens planes do. The answer didn’t say, but that can also be related to the fact that the SAS planes (at least the newer ones) are from Airbus and the Braathens planes are mainly from Boing.