Yes, I remember. The following week's repeat of 'Winged Assasin' had to be postponed until much later on, along with 'Big Ben Strikes Again' the week after. The former deals with the Mysteron hi-jacking of a jumbo jet, the latter an atomic bomb. Whilst one cannot fault the BBC's sensitive approach, showing 'Winged Assasin' later on would have been very confusing for a first time viewer as this follows on directly from the pilot episode.
Earlier that year, the BBC had postponed their repeats of the Thunderbird episodes 'The Perils of Penelope' and 'Brink of Disaster' in the wake of the Hatfield derailment.
Not sure about the whole eerie coincidence thing. Having seen all the Anderson puppet series, you'd probably be hard pushed to find any episode that doesn't contain a rail/plane hi-jack/crash/atomic explosion. That is perhaps a slight exaggeration, but the late Mr Anderson certainly packed his shows with plenty of explosions etc.