I read this week that you are seven times more likely to die by falling out of bed than you are to die in a plane crash. Moreover, the journey to the airport is far more hazardous and likely to end in tragedy than that airplane ride. But when you get that fear of flying, it’s hard to shift it.
The fear is largely irrational. I say largely because nothing in life is totally risk-free and the fearful flyer will not pay much attention to all those millions of flying hours go by incident-free. The terrible air tragedies of the last week have made terrible reading. There’s no story in a plane flying safely.
I was definitely in the fearful flyer category which is especially silly since I was also a minor aircraft enthusiast. I am not an enthusiast who goes round taking plane numbers, just like I didn’t in a previous life when I was a minor train enthusiast, something I gave up when the trains all started to look the same. I just liked watching planes take off and land.
My very first flight was not exactly a gentle hop. It was a flight from London Heathrow to Halifax, Nova Scotia, which stopped en route in Gander, Newfoundland in order to unload our luggage, take us through security, load our luggage again and take off some hours later. The plane was the long obsolete DC8, a four-engined plane about the same length as a 747 but slightly thinner. The flight was totally event-free but I still remember how everything shook very noisily as the plane rolled down the runway.
The ‘incidents’ started in 1983 when we had a lads holiday in the south of France. We flew on an elderly Dan Air 737 and as the plane rotated for take off, the door to the flight deck flew open. I was fully expecting to see the captain wrestling desperately at the controls but instead he turned round, smiled and resumed flying the aircraft.
Then in 1988, I was on a flight to Tenerife when liquid started pouring from the overhead locker. Assuming a fuel leak, the passenger next to me called a stewardess who opened the locker to find an open wine bottle gurgling out its contents! Disaster averted. I did know that fuel is not normally stored in overhead lockers but the irrational side of me soon took over.
In 1989, we were in Corfu airport waiting for our spanking new Paramount Airways MD83 to fly us home. We waited for almost eight hours before an elderly Boeing 707 with no markings landed noisily. What is that, I thought? The answer was quickly revealed when the PA announced the arrival of our ‘replacement aircraft.’
Boarding, the plane was in a right mess. The seats looked like they had been retrieved from a junk shop, the stewardesses looked like they’d been in the Russian salt mines. I wasn’t entirely optimistic that this very old plane would make it off the ground, but it did. Sadly, my seat collapsed as the plane took off and I found myself pinned on my back. It felt like an age until a stewardess released my seatbelt and allowed me to move!
Tenerife again three years later and we were on an old Boeing 737. The plane started to roll down the runway and there was an almighty ‘boom’. The engines spooled back, then they were spooled up again and off we flew. Two hours into the flight the captain explained the reason for the noise which of course I didn’t understand. To make matters worse, the flight was then diverted to Gran Canaria because, the captain said, there were holes in the runway. A likely story, I thought. But it was true.
Since then, it’s all been plain sailing, or rather plane flying.
The odd bit of turbulence, the changing engine noises (oh my god, it’s failed), the long slow turns which will surely see the plane fall out of the sky, but it never does!
Except that some planes do fall out of the sky. It rarely just happens and no plane has ever crashed due to clear air turbulence. It’s terrorists, it’s flying through insanely dangerous weather, it’s unusual.
As I get older, I treat flying as normal. I’ve had a good life, I sometimes think, as the plane gets ready to go.
And if you want to go where you really like, then it has to be done, so why not enjoy it?
