My fear of flying

Sun, 16 Dec 2012 17:00:00 +0000

If you go by the law of averages, a baseball player who gets a hit in seven consecutive at-bats is really pushing his luck when he steps to the plate for the eighth time. This is the logic that kept me from flying for more than 16 years.

My first four flights were all involuntary, products of the dictatorship that state and federal law grants parents over their offspring. So I had no recourse when Mom and Dad planned a family trip to Georgia in the summer of 1989. I was 9 years old and already suffering from a raging case of aerophobia. The proximate source of this affliction was the horrific tragedy of Pan Am Flight 103, which had exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, a few months earlier. The news reports had gripped me. I couldn’t stop thinking about what it must have been like for the passengers – sitting there comfortably, maybe talking, maybe sleeping, maybe watching a movie, and then in a micro-second a quick crack of noise followed instantly by … an eternity of nothingness. None of them ever saw it coming, or had any chance to do anything about it. The only way they could have saved themselves that day would have been by staying off that flight.

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My fear of flying