Chance for CNN's Richard Quest Interview to Feature MH370 Pilot Like Flipping Heads on Coin 18 Times In Row

Let's have fun and do some math...

The chance or probability for an event to have a specific outcome is equal to the number of occurrences with that specific outcome divided by the number of equally probable possible occurrences.

So when you flip a coin once, there are usually 2 equally probable outcomes of heads or tails. The chance of turning up heads is 1/2 and the same for tails. To get the percentage just multiply by 100%. For 1/2, that means 100% x 1/2 = 50%. Similarly, rolling a standard 6 sided die has a 1 in 6 chance of turning up any specific number or 100% x 1/6 = 16.7%.

Weeks prior to the disappearance of Flight MH370, CNN's Richard Quest had a story that featured 2 pilots, 1 of whom was 1 of the 2 pilots that disappeared with Flight MH370.

Assuming that CNN could have chosen these 2 pilots randomly from the pool of all possible pairs of major commercial airline pilots in the world, what is the chance that 1 of them would go missing with Flight MH370?

Here, it will get a little complicated, but in order to be fully accurate in what is stated here, this is required:

Let n = the number of major commercial airline pilots in the world.

Now how many pairs of pilots contain at least 1 of the missing pilots?

If you pick out 1 of the missing pilots from the group of n possible pilots, you are left with (n-1) pilots, so that this 1 pilot can form (n-1) unique pairs of pilots containing at least 1 of the pilots. This (n-1) count of pairs includes 1 pair with both pilots because the other pilot has to be 1 of the (n-1) pilots.

Now how many pairs contain only the second pilot? Well, when you pick the 2ND pilot out of the remaining (n-1) pilots, you have (n-2) pilots left with which he can pair up with. That means that there are (n-1)+(n-2) = (2n-3) unique pairs of pilots that contain at least 1 of the missing pilots.

Now how many possible unique pairs of pilots?

This number is the combination of n objects taking 2 at a time. The value is n(n-1)/2.

The chance of this happening randomly then is (2n-3)/(n(n-1)/2). With big numbers, you can ignore the -3 and -1, so that this becomes about 2n/(nxn/2) = 4/n.

Now some googling will give you about 144,600 Airline Transport Pilots in the U.S. The U.S. Population is about 316,000,000 with about 7,000,000,000 total people in the world. In other words, the world's population is about 22 times the population of the U.S. In order to extrapolate the U.S. pilot count to the world’s pilot count, let's be conservative and only multiple the 144,600 by 7. That gives about 1,012,200 pilots. You can play with the numbers a lot but it seems likely at least a 1 million commercial airline pilots are out there.

That means the chance for CNN to just randomly pick a pair of pilots containing one of the missing pilots is 4/n or about 1/250,000 or 100% x 1/250,000 = 0.0004%.

This is about the same chance of flipping a coin 18 times in a row and turning up heads each time.

It would likely take a person a week or more of constantly flipping a coin in order to get this result, but CNN basically hit it on the nose the first time.

This means you can be 99.9996% sure that this coincidence or occurence is not random.