Flying is an excercise in courage and psychology
by Michael Zidar, 1L
Law Weekly
April 1, 2009
The image on the news is one of nightmares. A cargo plane in Japan soars up into the air like any other, falters, then plunges back into the cement, exploding into a fireball, and flipping down the runway as flames and smoke fly from the wreckage. The camera cuts to the current scene of firemen putting out the fires. Two people died in this wreck. Halfway around the world, people flying from California to Montana for a ski trip crashed short of the runway; none of the fourteen passengers survived.
Online, news sites report on the story of a pilot being sentenced to jail time in Italy for praying before a crash; the court didn’t like the man’s decision to drop the controls and pray to a higher power.
These images come on the heels of the recent US Airways “landing” on the Hudson River. The massive plane was floating in the choppy water as boats ferried people to safety, making a temporary celebrity of C.B. "Sully" Sullenberger.
Stories like these do wonders for those like me who already fear flying. Once, I fell asleep on a plane. Apparently my mental fears and apprehensions got the best of my sleeping mind and decided to bless me with a dream of a plane wreck. I could feel the plane nosedive toward the ground, my thoughts spinning, “Is there a God? Is there an afterlife? How will the crash feel?” Fortunately, I awoke with a shout. I was covered with sweat and panting as I realized everything was okay.
Even while awake, I’ve had my problems; AirTran Airways offers a perk if you fly on their planes—XM radios in the armrests. Flying out of Atlanta, I thought that my radio would provide entertainment; that is, until shortly after takeoff the plane started pitching up and down through choppy winds. Suddenly it pitched too far to the left. Hanging in midair at a sixty-degree angle, the world looming below, I began to tense up and squeeze my armrests. I was squeezing so hard that the XM radio shattered. The buttons refused to work, the radio forever stuck on one station.
I feel that my personal stories and fears of flying are a perfect example of “right brain” versus “left brain” thinking. My “left brain” researches the statistics of flying and crashes; I know that flying is safe. I fly in and out of Atlanta quite often. It is a Delta hub, and so that’s my airline of choice.
They haven’t had a fatal crash since 1996. I know this doesn’t mean they never will again, but it should reassure me that things are fine with airline safety—at least with the planes I fly on. I tell myself, reassure myself, that there are thousands of planes in the air, and they don’t crash. Yet, my “right brain” thinks differently.
I know that I have a better chance of dying during a late night cab ride back from Dupont Circle than any plane flight. However, a cab wreck doesn’t offer the visceral reaction that huge airline accidents do.
My brain again thinks that I have control over things in life, even those I don’t. In a plane, it is all the pilot. If it crashes, during that final plunge to Earth, I have no control. That is another factor in this equation of dread—lack of control. In the end, though, I posit that the fear of flying strikes against our rational selves, away from logic.
Isn’t everything this way, though? Before a few tragedies scare us all off of air travel, shouldn’t rational thought save us—but will it? What works better for telling the world about global warming: statistics and science, or pictures of icebergs collapsing?
There is an almost infinite set of statistics one can use to talk of our downtrodden economy, but the bright red arrow of the sinking Dow says more to the average person than a packet full of Ph.D. dissertations on economics. Look at politics, all the detailed plans and political points candidates hold often boil down in the populace to simple quotes. Reagan’s “There you go again.” Obama’s “Yes we can.”
So airline crashes aren’t the end of the world. They aren’t common, but they are in the news, lingering in the back of our heads. These crashes say more about us, more about our love of big, shocking images, than do the facts. They forever capture our attention and overpower our logical side. No matter how much we tell ourselves that things are safe, our primal fears emerge.