Well, heres some morbidly fascinating news. A recent study by the Federal Aviation Administration examined the black box audio recordings from hundreds of doomed planes for clues to what caused them to crash and made a major discovery: Most crashes are caused by the pilot holding a turkey drumstick in each hand. Yikes! Really makes you wonder how many close calls youve had at 28,000 feet. The researchers pored over black box recordings from nearly 1,000 downed flights looking for evidence of what caused the planes to crash. Again and again, they found disturbing conversations like this one: After analyzing more than 500 similar conversations suggesting that a pilot holding drumsticks was the principal factor in a plane crash, the researchers divided these incidents into four categories, listed below in descending order of frequency: 