Congressmen vs Travel-Writers

I've done some follow-up research. My main source is this site about celebrity airplane crashes. I make no guarantees to the authenticity of said site, as until yesterday I didn't know it existed. They had no bias or agenda that I could spot, but I suspect they're based out of the US so regional celebrities from other parts of the world may be under-represented (I don't know).

Also, since their data is many pages, in paragraph form, and people don't fall in to comfy categories, there's a touch of subjectivity involved in this. I also didn't include 9/11, or any event that was clearly an admitted act of terrorism, since the point was to figure out whether or not the deaths of US Congressmen was an anomaly amongst non-intentional airplane crash statistics.

So, how many US Congressmen have died in plane crashes: 21. (Update: this is up to 22 as of Aug 2010.)

The total # of prominent US government officials to have died in plane crashes outside of war: 46
This breaks out as follows:

• # of US Representatives and Senators to have died in plane crashes: 21.
• # of Colonel-rank of higher military officials to have died in plane crashes outside of war: 11 (I think I included the famous spy plane pilot in this tally, despite not knowing his Rank, and obviously he was shot down intentionally, so a more accurate number may be 10 instead.)
  
• # of US Governors to have died in plane crashes: 4.
• # of former CIA Directors to have died in plane crashes: 1
• # of miscellaneous Government officials (cabinet members, state legislators, territorial legislators before Alaska became a state, etc) to have died in plane crashes: 9

Total # of foreign government officials to have died in plane crashes: 88
# of them from Israel, Pakistan or Afghanistan: 40
(note that these figures do not include the 34 aides to the President of Mozambique, as I was unable to determine what level of importance they held. By comparison, neither did I include any of the aides to US Senators in that section, above.)


# of Kennedy's to have died in plane crashes: 8.
(Plus, Teddy Kennedy narrowly survived a plane crash that killed 2 other passengers. Overall, members of the family have been in at least 6 different airplane crashes. You can learn more about The Kennedy Curse on wikipedia. In addition, one of the US Representatives who died in a plane crash had the last name Kennedy, but doesn't appear to be a close relative of the famous Kennedy clan.)

# of famous Actors and Directors (counting both screen and stage, domestic and foreign) to have died in plane crashes: 22.

# of famous Musicians (domestic and foreign, all genres) to have died in plane crashes: 57. (Like soccer teams, Musicians tend to crash in groups, though usually just 3 or 4 at time, not 20.)

# of corporate CEOs, Presidents, and CFOs (foreign and domestic both included, since most big companies are multinational) to have died in plane crashes: 18.

# of NASA employees to have died in plane or spacecraft crashes: 24.
# of famous non-NASA scientists or inventors to have died in plane or spacecraft crashes: 60 (46 of those 60 were from a single crash over the Ukraine, so, number of non-NASA scientists and inventors outside that one crash is only 14)

# of US Athletes and Coaches to have died in plane crashes: 135 (unfortunately, I was over half way done with my analysis before it occurred to me to seperate this into pro vs college. Obviously, there's a lot more college-level athletes than professional ones, and they tend to go down in groups. For example, one crash took out 43 Marshall University Football Players and Coaches. Anecdotally, it seemed like 80% or more of US Athlete deaths from aircrashes were at the college level, but I haven't run the numbers on that.)
# of foreign athletes to have died in plane crashes: 187 (more so than any other stat, this number is really subjective. Soccer teams go down in droves. There were cases of 14, 15, 17, 18, and 25 members of soccer teams dying at once, plus three unspecified "the entire team" entries that I counted as 20 people per team since I didn't have a more solid number)
# of professional race car drivers to have died in plane crashes: 10 (No other non-team sport had more than 3)

# of travel writers to have died in plane crashes: zero.
# of other authors to have died in plane crashes: 6. (I only counted people who are primarily known for being authors, not just anyone who wrote an autobiography.)

The autobiography / author point brings up some good issues of how hard it is to categorize people for the above purposes. For example:

Law professor Wesley J. Liebeler (71) and his flight instructor were killed when their plane crashed in Lake Winnipesaukee near Gilford, New Hampshire during a training flight. Liebeler served as counsel to the Warren Commission that investigated President John F. Kennedy's assassination.

Should I categorize Wes Liebeler as a 'famous Lawyer' (if so, 7 have died in plane crashes), as a Pilot (hundreds of those guys have died in plane crashes, including at least 29 'famous aviators'), or as someone within two degrees of separation from the JFK assassination (of which about 12 have died in plane crashes by my count)?

A similar conundrum exists for G. David Schine, who was an aid to Senator McCarthy, and a low ranking military man who died in a plane crash not related to war, and also executive producer of 1971's The French Connection. That's 3 categories he doesn't quite fit into.

And what about Michelle Clarke?

Clarke was the first black female anchorwoman on any network station in the U.S. As a child, her family was the first black family to move to Cicero, Illinois, sparking days of riots by whites, necessitating the call-up of the National Guard.

She died in the same plane crash that killed US Representative George Collins and Dorothy Hunt (wife of E. Howard Hunt, CIA operative and one of Nixon's "Plumbers"). This all seems somehow relevant to the discussion at hand, but doesn't fall neatly into any category from which I can extrapolate meaningful statistics (well, except Collins' death being 1 of 21 Congressmen).


# of members of Osama Bin Laden's personal family to have died in airplane crashes not related to 9/11: 2 (His father, Mohammed Bin Laden, died in a plane crash in the late 60s. Osama's older brother, Salem Bin Laden, died in a plane crash in 1988. What do you suppose was going through the man's head when he gave the orders to attack the US by crashing planes?)

I still intend to find out how the size of the various categories compare. For example, the number of Congressmen vs the number of major CEOs vs the number of Actors / Directors that died in plane crashes are very similar. But that similarity tells us nothing if we don't know how many people (who haven't died in plane crashes) fall into each of those groups.

(Eyeballing it: there's around 535 Congressmen at any given time. All the Fortune 500 companies have at least one person at the CEO/CFO/Chairman/President levels. My "Actor" category includes not just Hollywood actors and directors, but also broadway performers, foreign stars, etc. But that's all the energy I've got for this topic, at least for today.)

And (as was pointed out in the comments), we also need to know how often these people fly by small plane... solid data for which isn't readily available. So I don't think I'll ever end up with more certain numbers.