I used to be afraid of flying. Not that long ago, planes seemed to crash all the time. You could hardly turn on a news bulletin without learning of some ghastly air disaster. The so-called experts would appear on telly, after yet another catastrophic incident, to explain that actually going from A to B on an aircraft was safer than alternative forms of transport. In fact, you were more likely to die on the way to the airport to catch your flight than you were to die on it. Yet the thought still nagged away. This plane I am on weighs 93.5 tonnes when it takes me to where I want to be and, on the face of it, that sounds impossible. From being afraid of flying to not giving a fuck – actually no, I enjoy it now in between periods of on board boredome – has been a strange journey and I am now at the point where I can’t really understand how anyone else is fearful.
I am not going to pretend I fully understand the science behind flying, the theory of lift and all that. Nor do I really understand fully how aircraft engines work, other than that they do. But having flown countless flights since my first flight – an Air Canada DC8 from London Heathrow to Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1975 – I am happy that they do. I have catalogued before a series of utterly minor airborne ‘incidents’ that convinced me I was doomed but obviously I was far from doomed. A change in engine pitch, the thump below being nothing more than the landing gear being retracted and that fearsome ‘BING BONG!’ in the cabin, it turned out that these things were perfectly normal.
That first flight scared the shit out of me, since it was so loud the plane appeared to shake at an alarming degree in the process of take off up to the cruising altitude. Thereafter, nothing much happened, apart from the odd episode of turbulence. Subsequent flights from the late 1980s to the early 1980s were largely uneventful, although in the early 1980s, I was somewhat unnerved on a Dan Air flight from London Gatwick to Beziers in France, when as the plane rotated to take off, the door to the flight deck flew open, to reveal the captain puffing away on a cigarette. I was half-expecting him to be desperately grappling with the controls but he could not have appeared more relaxed. Somehow, the door slammed itself shut and we all lived happily ever after.
In 1985, a flight from Manchester to Corfu caught fire on the runway killing 55 passengers. We flew to Corfu from London Gatwick a couple of days later, on board an an elderly Dan Air again Boeing 727 which seemed to spend half the trip trying to get airborne. “Don’t worry,” said one of my friends. “Straight after a crash is the safest time to fly because the airlines will be keen to make sure it doesn’t happen again.” I still kept thinking, “Woah! What’s that noise?”
That I have now all but convinced myself that modern aircraft simply don’t fall out of the sky these days has changed the whole experience. It has been a long time since I held onto the arm rest or even my partner’s hand as panic, usually during landing or take off set in. Somewhat unpleasantly, I have morphed into a kind of devil may care flyer, confidently, arrogantly even, explaining to still nervous flyers that actually flying was perfectly safe and it was irrational to imagine otherwise, while all the time ignoring my own past as a nervous flyer. I was probably as obnoxiously sneering and superior as the ex-smoker (and I am one of those, too).
Yet as I touched on before, there is something special about watching planes take off and land. You do not get crowds of bearded, middle aged men outside the bus station watching buses and coaches depart to destinations all around the town and country. That just seems normal. Yet even yesterday, after completing an airport drop-off at Bristol Airport (Adge Cutler International), I decided to spend some time at the end of the runway watching planes take off and land and despite it being a normal Wednesday, there were half a dozen people, all men, obviously, doing the same thing. As the planes came and went, we’d all scramble out of our cars to watch them more clearly. God knows why.
Yet there are those of us – me again – who are fascinated by trains and spend probably far too much time at stations and other decent viewing points watching them go by. Even though trains are not as aesthetically pleasing as they once were, there is something magical about them and there is always the hope that something special – a rare diesel locomotive or even a steam engine – will pass by. I am always fascinated as trains run over the points that dictate the direction of travel just because I am. Trains, and the tracks they run on, seem other worldly, although it is easier to see how and why they work. What a plane does looks impossible.
A year ago, we were about to fly from Vancouver to London Heathrow on a Boeing 777, travelling the length of Canada, Greenland, the North Atlantic and finally Ireland and Britain. Frankly, it could not have been more boring. In fact, I was as bored as I used to be nervous. Flying, I noted, hadn’t really changed, but I had. There was something special about boarding, about taking off and to a lesser extent landing, but the bit in the middle, all nine hours of it, was the bit I could have done without.
The old joke goes as follows. I’m not afraid of flying. It’s crashing I’m worried about. But even that’s a thing of the past now. Even the emergencies I follow on various flight apps always end with the plane landing normally and no, I am not secretly gazing at the screen hoping for something untoward to happen. I might be a bit of a saddo, but not that sad.
So, excuse me for now. I have some live streams to follow, as I do most mornings, at London Heathrow, Madeira, Lanzarote and anywhere else I can find on YouTube. I still don’t understand the theory of lift buy I know that plenty of people do and although I still have a bit of “How the hell does that get off the ground?” I am now satisfied that the theory has been proved beyond reasonable doubt. Now where’s my anorak?
