Flight.

I, as those of you who know me already are much aware, am a nervous flier. And by "nervous", I mean that I cry on about a third of the flights I take, and panic at least briefly on probably 95% of them. Strange? Surprisingly not. Plenty of people on any given flight are wary at best, but in my own experience there are always others like me on board.

Some of my favorite flying adventures have been with the people I've met on flights. Several years ago I was traveling from Kansas City to Missoula, with a connection in Salt Lake. Weather in Missoula had been bad for days - inversions with heavy freezing fog, and they closed the Missoula airport just as my flight was boarding in Salt Lake. I got a hotel room for the evening and hoped that the fog would lift in time for my rebooked flight to land the following afternoon (the woman next to me on the plane had been trying unsuccessfully to fly into Missoula for three days - she said she was giving up and renting a car). The next day I was seated uncomfortably in row one of a Canadair regional jet (no leg room in that row!). The man in the seat next to me was a pilot who would be returning with the plane to SLC on the next flight. He was a friendly sort of fellow, who laughed and smiled as my white knuckled hands gripped the armrests. "Nervous flier?" he asked unnecessarily. "That would be an understatement," I replied. He spent the next half an hour explaining the details of flying, along the safety features of aircraft in general and particularly those of the little plane we were on. I appreciated the gesture, thought my problem is not a cognitive one. My brain knows that odds are strong in my favor of surviving each and every flight I take, but my viscera disagree.


On a flight from Kansas City to Minneapolis several years ago, I had a young, fun, equally terrified flier as a seatpartner. Jane, her name was. We introduced ourselves as we sat down and, given the storm outside, both promptly disclosed our fears of flight. As we ascended into the bumpy skies, she shared her flask of whisky with me, and I my mini bottle of wine with her. It turned out to be a fun trip...

Last year I was flying from Boston to Missoula, with a stop in Denver. The first leg of the flight was on a bigger plane, with rows of three. I found my seat at the back of the plane, sandwiched between two large men, and half obscured from view by their overlap. "That's me," I said to the guy on the aisle. "Oh good," he said to both me and his friend. "We were hoping it was someone little." (That's a good way to win most girls over right away.) I slid into my seat, the big guys' biceps encroaching on my space, pinning me snugly between the two of them. Most people might complain about this arrangement, but that was the safest I've ever felt on a plane. They were nice guys, and we had a pleasant chat during the flight.

It's strange, my flying problem. I have a little fear of heights, which contributes to the flying fear. "Flying isn't the same as heights," someone once told me, prior to my first trip on an airplane. "Like hell it's not," was my reply after that maiden flight. It's exactly like being 28,000 feet in the air, which seems pretty effing high to me.
Ironically, I love traveling. And airports. My issues with flying have never stopped me from taking a trip - in fact, I fly at least three times a year. And usually, after a few minutes of panic stricken fidgeting and gripping at my armrests, I calm down and enjoy the rest of the flight.

I go through spurts of obsessive reading about flying. Here are some links I found interesting.

Ask the pilot: turbulence - ask the pilot is a column written by a commercial pilot. Interesting stuff.

Turbulence forecast - gives predictions of turbulence over the continental U.S.

Flight Aware - track flights currently in the air