Turbulence
Prologue
Air is a fickle medium. It provides for us the oxygen needed to keep us alive; but also transports the scores of airborne diseases that can do us harm. It gives us weather: convection currents in the troposphere bringing rain to the continents and allowing the cycle of agriculture to go on, but it can also bring violent cyclones and tropical storms that wreak devastation. By manipulating air in the right way Bernoulli's Principle gives us the power to defy gravity. Air is what allows us to keep a plane in the sky, but is also what can bring it crashing down.
Just one random event disrupting the smooth flow of nitrogen and oxygen molecules over the wings of a plane can cause the aircraft to falter. Buffets of air attack its streamlined surfaces, forming turbulent whorls around the ailerons and disturbing the laminar currents so vital for lift.
Sometimes it's possible to recover. Sometimes it isn't. Eddies and vortices of gas flood the areas of low pressure. Airspeed declines. The forces opposing the plane overpower its thrust, decreasing its critical angle of attack. The plane's inclination tilts, and pockets of air turbulence form beneath its wings. Then it stalls. Gravity reaches up to take back the flying machine that defied it, the laws of physics suddenly switching allegiances to drag the plane back down instead of keeping it in the sky. The aircraft begins to plummet: a result of the random motion of millions of tiny particles that by a random event became embroiled in chaos.
Inside the aircraft, passengers feel it: the violent shaking of the fuselage and the sudden changes in pressure that make the fluid in their ears pop. Panic begins. Tiny specks of life, caught 37 000 feet above the surface of their planet, about to be snuffed out.
Outside, particles of air continue to flow in disorder around the metal structure. They collide with each other, each one affecting the motion of the others like a miniscule cue ball smashing into the triangle of reds. Their paths are impossible to predict, the microscopic chaotic effects building up to impact the particles' surroundings on a macroscopic level. Random chance determines their motion.
Random chance that decides which particle should hit where at which instant, happening to be in such a way that the turbulent forces of air are sufficient to overpower the plane. Random chance dictates which people happened to be on the doomed flight, their lives coalescing and colliding at this one pivotal event as the plane falls thousands of feet to the earth. Random chance that determines who lives and who dies.
If, indeed, chaos is truly random at all.