Man Gets Caught In World's Luckiest Traffic Jam, Misses Indonesian Lion Air Flight

DAILY MAIL – A plane passenger is lucky to be alive after traffic made him late for the doomed Lion Air flight that crashed in to the sea off Indonesia.

Sony Setiawan, an official in Indonesia’s finance ministry was due to be among the 189 people on board flight JT 610 when it took off early from the capital Jakarta on Monday morning.

But he was held up on his commute to Soekarno-Hatta International Airport because of the city’s notorious road congestion and never boarded the Boeing-737.

Minutes after takeoff, the plane disappeared from radar before plunging 5,000ft in to the Java Sea. Officials do not expect to find any survivors.

Setiawan took a later flight to Pangkal Pinang on another airline. Pictures show him surrounded by journalists after arriving safely today.

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As everyone who knows me through the internet knows, flying is one of my biggest fears.  To be more specific – EXACTLY what happened on Lion Air Flight JT 610 is my biggest fear: something going wrong during takeoff, when the plane is over water.  That’s why I can’t even step on board without my prescribed anxiety meds, perfectly timed to make sure I’m knocked out for takeoff.  Once we’re in the air at cruising altitude, it’s all good – it’s just those first few minutes where you know 1,000 things can go wrong and you’ve seen it happen to Denzel Washington and Tom Hanks one too many times.

So while Sony Setiawan experienced one of the world’s greatest annoyances and sources of rage – an unexplained traffic jam – it ended up being the luckiest thing that ever happened to him.  You thought that person in South Carolina that won the $1.6 billi Mega Millions was lucky?  The 325,699,999 people who didn’t win were just left with whatever’s in their bank account.  Sony gets to be alive and not crash in a plane.

The ill-fated Lion Air flight was a journey he and his colleagues caught on a weekly basis.

But while his friends battled their way through Jakarta’s daily congestion to make the flight, Sony found himself stuck on a toll road for hours.

A sprawling and haphazardly planned megacity, Jakarta is known for having some of Southeast Asia’s worst traffic congestion with lengthy tailbacks and hours-long delays a daily frustrating ritual for commuters.

‘I usually take (flight) JT610 – my friends and I always take this plane,’ Setiawan told AFP.

‘I don’t know why the traffic at the toll road was so bad. I usually arrive in Jakarta at 3am but this morning I arrived at the airport at 6:20 and I missed the flight.’

Six of his friends and colleagues died in the crash – really puts banging your fist against the steering wheel while bumper to bumper at a toll booth into perspective.

PS,

Trying to decide if I would get back on that weekly flight after this.  Logic says you should actually feel great about it, because that statistical anomaly is out of the way now.  But statistics don’t give me any comfort.  It’s like how they always said no Final Four has ever had all the #1 seeds.  Then it happened.  With my luck I’d be the “holy shit, this was the most improbable event of all time” guy.