Some time ago I wrote a piece about my fear of flying. It was after reading Erica Jong’s 1973 novel Fear of Flying, which had nothing to do with flying. But it had a bit in it about her own fear of flying that captured my anxiety. Her description of trembling on takeoff mirrored mine.
Whenever I think about boarding a hunk of silver metal that weighs more than a large beluga whale that’s about to hurtle across the hopefully vacant sky, “my fingers (and toes) turn to ice,” she wrote. “My stomach leaps upward into my rib cage, the temperature in the tip of my nose drops to the same temperature in my fingers, and my heart and the engine correspond as we attempt to prove again that the laws of aerodynamics [will save us].”
My pre-flight anxiety is the worst. It starts the minute I book a flight. But I never give in to my fear of flying because I love to travel, and like most of us I try to believe that “it won’t happen to me.”
But what’s been occurring in aviation recently has ratcheted up my anxiety big time, especially because I will be flying a few weeks after this writing, and again a few months after that. It doesn’t help that both trips involve several flights, two of which are in very small planes, and two of which are transatlantic, which means there’s nowhere to land in an emergency unless you can make it to Iceland.
Now my anxiety is over the top because of all the recent accidents, one of which resulted in casualties, along with near-misses, mechanical failures, and the possibility of FAA being privatized while lots of air traffic controllers are being fired although there’s already a shortage of these experienced people who keep planes from crashing into each other. (Experts have been saying for years that near-misses on runways are more common than the traveling public may realize.)
Then there’s the cluster of potential disasters taking place in aircraft cabins which appear to be increasing. Some chilling stories include a man who tried to stab a flight attendant on a cross-country flight and a flight attendant who had her nose broken by an unruly passenger. Cabin crews have reported other physical attacks as well as sexual harassment.
It’s also clear that climate change and global warming have played a part in increased episodes of severe turbulence. The research is clear: Earth’s warming is increasing the risks of dangerously bumpy flights. Last year thirty-six passengers on a flight to Hawaii were injured and a transatlantic flight had to make an emergency landing at Dulles International Airport in Virginia. Incidents like these are ratcheting up as the number of flights increases and the weather makes us all vulnerable to weather conditions.
I’ve probably flown hundreds of flights all over the world for work or pleasure and mostly things have been fine. But I’ve had some close calls. Flying over the Andes once the turbulence was so intense I wondered if I’d be forced to eat survivors as we waited for rescue. I also had a “close as it gets” landing in Honduras when two aircraft rounded a mountain simultaneously while trying to land.
Now I have a new thing to worry about. I’m wondering if I’d be allowed back into the United States or whether I’d be handtied, held for hours (hopefully without my head being shaved) and disappeared into a place like El Salvador. That’s because it’s no secret that I am a left-leaning journalist, an activist, and pro-Palestinian advocate. I’m also a feminist and liberal – words on the don’t use list. My anxiety grows daily thanks to Donald and his sidekicks. So does my husband’s, a green card holder.
When I’m rational I realize that air travel is statistically safer than getting in your car. I know that like cars, airplanes are, for most of us, a necessary part of modern life. Still, there is something that kicks in when I board an airplane, and the door is sealed by a gatekeeper on a terra firma ramp. As the engines rev, and safety instructions, which are pretty useless, are demonstrated, I think of Erica Jong, who admitted that “constant vigilance” was her motto. “I keep concentrating very hard, helping the pilot fly that 250 passenger !#+@!” she said. These days I relate to that more than ever.
A comedian once captured my own aerophobia (a real word). It gives me something to laugh at when the going gets rough. “"My fear of flying,” he shared, “starts as soon as I buckle myself in and then the guy up front mumbles a few unintelligible words then before I know it, I'm thrust into the back of my seat by acceleration that seems way too fast and the rest of the trip is an endless nightmare of turbulence, of near misses. And then the cabbie drops me off at the airport."
So, here's to all the newly fearful travelers as we buckle up. Long may we have smooth flights to our destinations and return trips home, safely, without incident, or white knuckles.
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Elayne Clift writes, and worries about flying, from Brattleboro, Vt.