The most scared I have been is when I bought an incredibly cheap flight to New York on an Air India plane that had started in Delhi and was stopping off in London to fill the only remaining seat with me, or so it seemed. When I got on all the other passengers were still sleeping, many in that 'leaning their head against the seat in front' position...it gave the impression that the plane had already crashed.
Best novel about airline safety, based on the truth, is Judy Blume's In the Unlikely Event...excellent and extraordinary
I wonder if you ever considered one of these 'I can cure your phobia' people like Paul McKenna. Using NLP I think. I recall seeing him on TV working what seemed like miraculous cures. Jon Ronson had a (typically) brilliant piece on him in the Guardian.https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2006/may/20/weekend.jonronson1
I think you're of sufficiently high profile that you'd get mentioned in news reports about any crash you were in, Ed, so you might get a posthumous bump in book sales, or at the very least people would share this article.
Thank you for writing this, I no longer feel so weird for being so absolutely terrified of flying. And I’m a statistician! It doesn’t help! I only fly for work so I’m lucky to be in business class but even the champagne doesn’t help. The flight I take most often is the overnight from Philadelphia to Heathrow. There are *so many* flights taking off more or less at the same time - a traffic jam to get to the take off strip then when you’re in the sky, climbing, with that awful shrieking engine noise, if you’re stupid enough to look out the window you see this mass of planes at various stages of ascent, it leaves me rigid with terror. Then after dinner and they turn up the temperature and put the lights down, nearly everyone lies down and goes to sleep, and I try to do so but there’s *always* turbulence and you get slammed about while strapped horizontal. At times I’ve struggled to breathe! Even while I’m laughing at my unstatistical irrationality, I’m still struggling to breathe. I dream of retirement and never flying again and starting to go on cruises... until I pre-imagine the terror I’ll feel trapped on board a metal box being buffeted about by waves on top of a bottomless, sucking ocean and hundreds of miles from the shore! It’s a staycation for me!
The incident involving liquids was in August 2006, which I know because I had to travel from Central Asia to the US via Yerevan and Heathrow less than 24 hours after it happened and it was total chaos. They wouldn’t let us carry anything on the plane (not a book even, for a 12+ hour flight.). On the plus side, deplaning was very fast!
I have to travel with an epipen and when I strenuously objected to it being checked, because I wouldn’t be able to eat anything, they had to put it in the cockpit with the pilot on all three flights that day. The security at Heathrow was almost at strip search levels and everyone was aggressively patted down. (I wearing a passport belt under my dress and had to take it off right there in front of everyone and God. It wasn’t a fabulous moment).
I don’t fear flying, having said all that. I’m hugely afraid of heights, to the point that things like the Empire State Building or going up the Statue of Liberty made me want to throw up or pass out.
'It’s awe-inspiring being up above the clouds, to experience something that our great-grandparents would have found mind-blowing'
I'm one of those unfortunate people who find nothing awe-inspiring. The Grand Canyon? Yep, just like the pictures. St. Pauls Cathedral? A big church. The Milky Way? A barely visible smear. Everything is much as I imagined it to be. What's wrong with me? Have I had an awe by-pass?
I somehow find flying just above the houses much more affecting than flying above the clouds. The latter just doesn't seem real to me and the ground a vague and remote idea. I have the same reaction to art. I (sort of) like art that I can imagine myself doing if I had any skill, talent or drive. Yet some works seem so far beyond what is humanly possible, skill-wise, that rather than knocking my socks off I just lose interest.
And, of course, were the sailing phobias of the past. An American family of engineers sent their sons to mid 19th century Russia to build the railroad from Moscow to St. Petersburg for the czar, becoming fabulously wealthy in the process. One son returned to the US where he lived out his life a member of the gilded age. However, as the initial trans-Atlantic crossing to Russia had been so difficult and nerve-wracking due to storms, the other son developed a fear of sailing and only made it as far west as England, where he spent the rest of his long life in a large house in Brighton, refusing to ever get on a ship again. If you want to spend a hour in the google rabbit hole, you can google them: Thomas and William Winans. There's other fascinating aspects to this little known family.
I did have a short lived phobia of driving on highways following a car accident (I was in the back seat of a taxi). While I could drive on local roads, if I got on to a fast road with speed limits above 50 MPH, it was quite a terrifying feeling, with a sense of blind terror creeping up you and making you numb, and I was sure I'd lose control of the car and crash into something and kill people. Eventually I said I can't be defeated by something that had once been so natural to me (flying down at 70 MPH). So I would get up early Sunday mornings and carefully drive out to the local empty highway and gradually build up my confidence once more. It's still not what it was once before but I can now handle it.
'I don’t like sailing much either, so the thought of spending days stuck in high winds on the Atlantic while Céline Dion plays in the background is not exactly an enticing prospect.'
Samuel Johnson paraphrase:
Being on a cruise is like being in prison - with the added danger of drowning.
I worked for Air Lingus at Heathrow as a baggage handler just after I left school. We had to watch a video about the dangers of being sucked into the engines of an Aircraft. Planes are terrifying things on the ground. There was also a dislike of El Al as AerLingus at the time did baggage handling for several airlines and El Al security was very present
In 2011 my brother and I were flying to Virginia beach via Detroit. There was a guy in traditional islamic dress amongst the passengers..I texted my pal - He is probably concerned about the two paddies . Anyway we go and take our seats . A steward asks the guy in Islamic dress to come with him for a moment.
Then 2 minutes later armed police board the plane from both ends. Dogs etc. They search rhe guys seat. They disassemble the seat. Then they ask everyone around the seat. " Did that man give you anything- Are these your bags? - While checking the overhead lockers. The police leave
There is 10 minutes of okay...I am am not sure I want to travel in this plane.
Heathrow makes us change planes and I fly off to Virginia Beach. The story never makes the news.
Oh and the witness at my Wedding was a Peruvian AF general . Walter. Walter who was the spitting image of ny dad had crashed into the jungle and walked out.
"The modern world is remarkably impressive at making our lives safer, "
Safety is one of the curses of modernity. Safety makes for timidity. Children can hardly play anymore. They can't even ride bicycles without wearing crash helmets and knee pads. An important part of play is the sense of danger. Climbing trees and swinging on ropes twenty or more feet high, riding bicycles or dirt bikes airborne in jumps off ramps, hanging and swinging on monkey bars, and other kinds of childhood play used to build courage and daring which is sorely lacking in childhood and adults nowadays. It is probably why so many have a fear of flying.
Ed, take a while to read 'Admiral Cloudberg' - detailed examinations of exactly why crashes happened and when. Why a 'controlled flight into terrain'? Why did a plane head hundreds of miles in the wrong direction over the Amazon? Why did two pilots make a deadly mistake and continue to deny all the signs around them in the cockpit? Some are too much physics, but start off with the terrifying Air France AF447 disaster and read from there.
I'm a generally nervous flier, but the more I read these forensic examinations of why things happened - and especially how the system was adapted to deal with human frailty afterwards - have made me a better flier.
That said, I had a rather hairy take off from DC to Schipol last night that made me wonder whether I really knew whether a 'bank angle' alarm would be going off in the cockpit.
The Kegworth disaster is best remembered for the legend of Henry, Britain's unluckiest hedgehog. He crossed all six lanes of the MI successfully, only to be flattened by the BMA 737.
Be grateful we would never share a flight. I’d be like “nose up. Nose up” or “Descent. Descent. 15. 10. 5” in a mechanised voice to really shit you up. Im so mean like that.
My sister was terrified of flying so she sought help and an ex pilot who provides some sort of help as such told her that air is like jelly so you may bounce around a lot but you won’t plummet to the earth like an arrow.
The bigger issue is of course super random events. Terrorism. And pilots who’ve just split up with their wives. Otherwise you’re good.
I have noticed that massive air traffic fiascos and huge weather related spectacular tragedies tend to happen around Christmas. Just saying.
Ed, your Substack is some of the best money I spend each year. This was a thoroughly enjoyable read.
I developed a fear of flying out of the blue at age 22. My body locked up when I was boarding a flight home from a work assignment. I have no idea how I “resolved” my fear in the ~8 years since, but I’m thankful I did.
You didn't even mention what may be the worst risk of all; the airlines moving to DEI rather than competence in hiring flight crew. Here's a horror story: https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/airline-safety-is-off-to-a-bad-start-in-2024-thanks-to-biden-admin-policies/
The most scared I have been is when I bought an incredibly cheap flight to New York on an Air India plane that had started in Delhi and was stopping off in London to fill the only remaining seat with me, or so it seemed. When I got on all the other passengers were still sleeping, many in that 'leaning their head against the seat in front' position...it gave the impression that the plane had already crashed.
Best novel about airline safety, based on the truth, is Judy Blume's In the Unlikely Event...excellent and extraordinary
I wonder if you ever considered one of these 'I can cure your phobia' people like Paul McKenna. Using NLP I think. I recall seeing him on TV working what seemed like miraculous cures. Jon Ronson had a (typically) brilliant piece on him in the Guardian.https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2006/may/20/weekend.jonronson1
I think you're of sufficiently high profile that you'd get mentioned in news reports about any crash you were in, Ed, so you might get a posthumous bump in book sales, or at the very least people would share this article.
I only remember this attempted hijacking because Bryan Ferry was on board https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_2069?wprov=sfla1 (for some reason I thought Liz Hurley was also on that flight, but I appear to have misremembered that).
Thank you for writing this, I no longer feel so weird for being so absolutely terrified of flying. And I’m a statistician! It doesn’t help! I only fly for work so I’m lucky to be in business class but even the champagne doesn’t help. The flight I take most often is the overnight from Philadelphia to Heathrow. There are *so many* flights taking off more or less at the same time - a traffic jam to get to the take off strip then when you’re in the sky, climbing, with that awful shrieking engine noise, if you’re stupid enough to look out the window you see this mass of planes at various stages of ascent, it leaves me rigid with terror. Then after dinner and they turn up the temperature and put the lights down, nearly everyone lies down and goes to sleep, and I try to do so but there’s *always* turbulence and you get slammed about while strapped horizontal. At times I’ve struggled to breathe! Even while I’m laughing at my unstatistical irrationality, I’m still struggling to breathe. I dream of retirement and never flying again and starting to go on cruises... until I pre-imagine the terror I’ll feel trapped on board a metal box being buffeted about by waves on top of a bottomless, sucking ocean and hundreds of miles from the shore! It’s a staycation for me!
The incident involving liquids was in August 2006, which I know because I had to travel from Central Asia to the US via Yerevan and Heathrow less than 24 hours after it happened and it was total chaos. They wouldn’t let us carry anything on the plane (not a book even, for a 12+ hour flight.). On the plus side, deplaning was very fast!
I have to travel with an epipen and when I strenuously objected to it being checked, because I wouldn’t be able to eat anything, they had to put it in the cockpit with the pilot on all three flights that day. The security at Heathrow was almost at strip search levels and everyone was aggressively patted down. (I wearing a passport belt under my dress and had to take it off right there in front of everyone and God. It wasn’t a fabulous moment).
I don’t fear flying, having said all that. I’m hugely afraid of heights, to the point that things like the Empire State Building or going up the Statue of Liberty made me want to throw up or pass out.
'It’s awe-inspiring being up above the clouds, to experience something that our great-grandparents would have found mind-blowing'
I'm one of those unfortunate people who find nothing awe-inspiring. The Grand Canyon? Yep, just like the pictures. St. Pauls Cathedral? A big church. The Milky Way? A barely visible smear. Everything is much as I imagined it to be. What's wrong with me? Have I had an awe by-pass?
I somehow find flying just above the houses much more affecting than flying above the clouds. The latter just doesn't seem real to me and the ground a vague and remote idea. I have the same reaction to art. I (sort of) like art that I can imagine myself doing if I had any skill, talent or drive. Yet some works seem so far beyond what is humanly possible, skill-wise, that rather than knocking my socks off I just lose interest.
And, of course, were the sailing phobias of the past. An American family of engineers sent their sons to mid 19th century Russia to build the railroad from Moscow to St. Petersburg for the czar, becoming fabulously wealthy in the process. One son returned to the US where he lived out his life a member of the gilded age. However, as the initial trans-Atlantic crossing to Russia had been so difficult and nerve-wracking due to storms, the other son developed a fear of sailing and only made it as far west as England, where he spent the rest of his long life in a large house in Brighton, refusing to ever get on a ship again. If you want to spend a hour in the google rabbit hole, you can google them: Thomas and William Winans. There's other fascinating aspects to this little known family.
I did have a short lived phobia of driving on highways following a car accident (I was in the back seat of a taxi). While I could drive on local roads, if I got on to a fast road with speed limits above 50 MPH, it was quite a terrifying feeling, with a sense of blind terror creeping up you and making you numb, and I was sure I'd lose control of the car and crash into something and kill people. Eventually I said I can't be defeated by something that had once been so natural to me (flying down at 70 MPH). So I would get up early Sunday mornings and carefully drive out to the local empty highway and gradually build up my confidence once more. It's still not what it was once before but I can now handle it.
'I don’t like sailing much either, so the thought of spending days stuck in high winds on the Atlantic while Céline Dion plays in the background is not exactly an enticing prospect.'
Samuel Johnson paraphrase:
Being on a cruise is like being in prison - with the added danger of drowning.
Well, it's official: Ed is my doppelganger on the other side of the pond.
I worked for Air Lingus at Heathrow as a baggage handler just after I left school. We had to watch a video about the dangers of being sucked into the engines of an Aircraft. Planes are terrifying things on the ground. There was also a dislike of El Al as AerLingus at the time did baggage handling for several airlines and El Al security was very present
In 2011 my brother and I were flying to Virginia beach via Detroit. There was a guy in traditional islamic dress amongst the passengers..I texted my pal - He is probably concerned about the two paddies . Anyway we go and take our seats . A steward asks the guy in Islamic dress to come with him for a moment.
Then 2 minutes later armed police board the plane from both ends. Dogs etc. They search rhe guys seat. They disassemble the seat. Then they ask everyone around the seat. " Did that man give you anything- Are these your bags? - While checking the overhead lockers. The police leave
There is 10 minutes of okay...I am am not sure I want to travel in this plane.
Heathrow makes us change planes and I fly off to Virginia Beach. The story never makes the news.
Oh and the witness at my Wedding was a Peruvian AF general . Walter. Walter who was the spitting image of ny dad had crashed into the jungle and walked out.
Your fear is not so irrational .
"The modern world is remarkably impressive at making our lives safer, "
Safety is one of the curses of modernity. Safety makes for timidity. Children can hardly play anymore. They can't even ride bicycles without wearing crash helmets and knee pads. An important part of play is the sense of danger. Climbing trees and swinging on ropes twenty or more feet high, riding bicycles or dirt bikes airborne in jumps off ramps, hanging and swinging on monkey bars, and other kinds of childhood play used to build courage and daring which is sorely lacking in childhood and adults nowadays. It is probably why so many have a fear of flying.
Ed, take a while to read 'Admiral Cloudberg' - detailed examinations of exactly why crashes happened and when. Why a 'controlled flight into terrain'? Why did a plane head hundreds of miles in the wrong direction over the Amazon? Why did two pilots make a deadly mistake and continue to deny all the signs around them in the cockpit? Some are too much physics, but start off with the terrifying Air France AF447 disaster and read from there.
I'm a generally nervous flier, but the more I read these forensic examinations of why things happened - and especially how the system was adapted to deal with human frailty afterwards - have made me a better flier.
That said, I had a rather hairy take off from DC to Schipol last night that made me wonder whether I really knew whether a 'bank angle' alarm would be going off in the cockpit.
The Kegworth disaster is best remembered for the legend of Henry, Britain's unluckiest hedgehog. He crossed all six lanes of the MI successfully, only to be flattened by the BMA 737.
Be grateful we would never share a flight. I’d be like “nose up. Nose up” or “Descent. Descent. 15. 10. 5” in a mechanised voice to really shit you up. Im so mean like that.
My sister was terrified of flying so she sought help and an ex pilot who provides some sort of help as such told her that air is like jelly so you may bounce around a lot but you won’t plummet to the earth like an arrow.
The bigger issue is of course super random events. Terrorism. And pilots who’ve just split up with their wives. Otherwise you’re good.
I have noticed that massive air traffic fiascos and huge weather related spectacular tragedies tend to happen around Christmas. Just saying.
Ed, your Substack is some of the best money I spend each year. This was a thoroughly enjoyable read.
I developed a fear of flying out of the blue at age 22. My body locked up when I was boarding a flight home from a work assignment. I have no idea how I “resolved” my fear in the ~8 years since, but I’m thankful I did.