There was a time when I was scared of flying. That time lasted from my first flight on a DC8 from London to Halifax Nova Scotia until around five years ago. I had concluded that flying was inherently unsafe and that it would only be a matter of time until I met a tragic ending.
My fears stemmed from a number of ‘incidents’ on flights I had taken, things that happened which were of no significance at all, but I took to mean imminent death. They are many and ridiculous.
How about when flying on a Dan Air 737 to Beziers in France 30-odd years ago for a lads holiday? As the plane rotated at take off, the door to the flight deck flew open, revealing the captain not wrestling with the controls, but puffing away on a cigarette? The door made an enormous bang and I almost had a major disaster in the trouser department until I realised nothing much had happened.
A few years later, I was sitting on the aircraft mid flight when a strange liquid started to pour from the overhead lockers. I assumed the worst – that this was a major fuel leak, despite the fact that fuel was not usually stored in the overhead lockers and so it wasn’t this time. It was wine, gurgling out of a bottle that had somehow cracked.
And never forget the time when there was a huge ‘boom’ from one engine of a plane when we took off from Bristol and the captain took a full three hours to explain, in impenetrable pilot-speak, that basically nothing much had happened.
Everything terrified me. The regular ‘BONG!’ noise was not someone asking for a glass of water, it was the captain sending out a coded message to the crew that the plane was in distress. The spooling back of the engines post take off clearly meant engine failure, not spooling back because take-off power was not required for the entire flight. And turbulence: well, this was the end. Even though turbulence is completely safe. Why could I not just learn to love the experience? Instead of gripping my partner’s arm for dear life, could I not chill out and enjoy the view? Eventually, yes. That’s exactly what I did.
I think getting old is part of it. Just as not quite being so wound up about football results than I used to be, or generally worrying about things that don’t matter. Now I do still worry about things that don’t matter because I wouldn’t be a basket case mentally if I didn’t, but I have been able to train my brain to not worry about some things that are not important. Like flying, for example. I managed to work out it was far more dangerous to drive to the airport than to fly from it. I was probably in more danger carrying the suitcase to check in.
The fear of flying has gone. Even when the plane decided to bounce about on the way to Lanzarote, I no longer cared. The the bongs kept bonging and the engine pitch kept changing, I realised at last it was all normal and if it wasn’t, what could I do about it? Sweet FA.
