Aerophobia

Josh Marshall has an interesting post about being a recovering aerophobe, and he tells this story:

I still don’t [fly] very often. And it’s not easy. But I do it. In fact, my last flight, which was a few months ago, turned out to be that nightmare turbulence flight I’d always dreaded. (Yes, I know turbulence doesn’t make planes crash; it’s not rational.) The key moment for me was when the pilot went from saying we would be hitting turbulence, to a lot of turbulence, to ‘severe turbulence’ to ‘really severe turbulence’.

If you have no difficulty flying, the best way for me to put this into context would be to say that the moment the pilot finds the phrase ‘severe turbulence’ insufficient is not a good moment.

I’ve written before about how Amtrak helped resolve my anxieties about flying. Now, of course, I live somewhere that’s only accessible by air or water and has an airport that’s reputed to be one of the most difficult on the planet to navigate. There are at least three take-off and landing trajectories I can think of which, viewed from the ground, would persuade the casual observer that s/he was about to watch a jet plow into the side of a mountain. And that doesn’t even take into account the turbulence, which I’ve seen reduce people to tears. One of the first times we flew out of here, I was so sure the plane was going to disintegrate that I began scrolling through a list of people who I thought might be able to take care of my dog after my wife and I were gone. I was also pretty sure that half the plane had been screaming for the ten minutes or so that the fuselage was being reshaped into a pretzel; when things calmed down, a more seasoned flier sitting next to us assured me that I’d been hearing things and that we’d just gone through some pretty routine chop.

(As for the topic of unreassuring cockpit chatter: My mother once boarded a flight in St. Louis. As the plane waited at the gate, and while the captain was offering his pre-takeoff welcome, the engines suddenly kicked off. The pilot, mid-sentence, uttered the single word “Whoops.” A few moments of awkward silence, he continued: “Let’s try that again.”)