Flight scares

There was the plane I was on whose pilot had a heart attack, but there were two back-up pilots, so hey.

Needless to say we didn't. But I've been scared by flying ever since.

Now before I go I look on the web. Stick fear of flying into google. You'll find there is 'high level' fear of flying which deserves proper phobia treatment, which is offered by several airlines but at a cost.

Then there is what I've got, and what I suspect you've got, which is more low level - makign the flight uncomfortable rather than stopping you from getting on the plane in the first place. Many of these websites provide just the information that I find makes the difference. How many accidents actually occur? Why is turbulence safe? Why don't the wings fall off? What's that funny noise? Why does the plane stay up and why is it acutally quite hard to knock it out of the sky? Why must I be nice to people of middle eastern apperance in spite having been fed pictures of Sept 11 like Pavlov's dog? Sorry, not the last one.

But seriously, I strongly reccomend reading these websites through - I do it each time before I fly. It doesn't cure the problem, but it sure helps.

they landed safely and no one was hurt. hurrah.

(I hate flying, I use "environmental concerns" as an excuse not go in planes)

See, this is part of why flying is so scary for me. I know full well there's little chance of crashing, but if my plane does crash then there's a good chance that I'll know I'm gonna die for quite a while before it happens. Maybe half an hour, in some cases. Whereas in a car, say, where there's a much greater chance of a serious accident, I won't know anything about it beforehand. I'll be driving along and then suddenly die. I can't image what happens to the minds of people in a plane condemned to crash. Too much to think about.

So I'm curious about the chances of survival AFTER something goes wrong. On how many flights do the passengers have to assume the crash position, for instance? What percentage of them really go on to crash?

I've been in a plane that had a bomb threat phoned in on the way to Jo-burg. We had to land in Kinshassa for several hours while they went through all the luggage, found the bomb, took it out in the country and blew it up safely. I was about 3 at the time, and scared shitless.

But I've got Fear Of Flying now, post-911, and I won't go near a plane ever again.

And Jel, well spotted that my line about this was not entirely true!

then we got on the plane, and as it moves along to the runway it stops and starts a couple of times which never happened before but once it took off there were no probs.

https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/n840an#393aa21f

AA292 JFK to Delhi, bomb threat... diverted over the Caspian Sea and backtracked 2k miles (!) over the Caucausus/Black Sea/Balkans to Rome.

Not that this compares, at all, but I was once on a flight that landed and then immediately took right back off and proceeded to fly in a circle for about an hour before landing again. And the pilot/flight crew didn't say a word about it.

"MY TIP FOR SCARED FLYERS = always sit near the back. When you see those pictures of crashed planes on the evening news, you always seem to see the tail section of the plane intact. That is also where the black box is located, so it must be the safest place. Oops, hope I haven't scared you too much............"

This little piece of advice from twenty-two years ago is uncanny, given that the only two survivors of the crash in South Korea at the end of last year were sitting in the back, and in fact the photo in that article shows the tail section of that plane in reasonably good shape. Admittedly it's crushed and burned and upside-down, but apart from that it's a-ok.

Which raises the question of whether any airlines have thought about charging slightly more for a seat in the rear, for peace of mind. If real life was a 1980s action film set in a dystopian, hyper-capitalist future I could imagine an airline adding a little surcharge whereby passengers could pay an extra £25 for a higher chance of surviving a catastrophic crash and fire. Ironically everybody would want to sit in the back, which would make the plane unbalanced, and it would crash. But that's what dystopias are like.

I'd just like to tell the people of 2002 that, thankfully, 2025 is not a hyper-capitalist dystopia. I wouldn't want to hurt you, people of 2002. The last thing I would ever do to you is lie to you.

Given that the original OP was posting back in 2002 I wonder if they were worried about hijackings. That's something that has gone completely off the radar in the last twenty years. Wikipedia lists only three this decade, one of which was a kind of quasi hijacking (the incident where a Ryanair plane was diverted to Minsk so that the authorities could arrest a journalist).

On a personal level the worst turbulence I ever encountered was a flight coming in to Pisa, perhaps because it flew out over the sea and back towards the land. I remember repeating to myself "I am the king of the echo people", but it was no good. The recurrent thought of the wings just snapping off was too much to mask, although I know in my mind that the entire airframe would disintegrate before that point.

I used to be terrified of flying then I started taking valium before flights then my doctor stopped prescribing it so I just tried to trick myself into the mindset that the valium used to do for me. One huge freakout on the way across the Atlantic once where we were going through turbulence for ages, but the cabin crew member buckled in across from me was excellent, and helped me realise she gets this all the time and still turns up for work every day to endure it again.

A year or so later we were diverted to Iceland to offload a medical emergency and a whole extra take-off and landing was just annoying. That's when I knew I'd really cracked it.

Also I watch tons of Air Crash Investigation and realise how rare these things are, how reactive the airline industry is to every little thing that can go wrong to ensure it doesn't happen again, and how awesome pilots are