My Dad’s a Pilot, and I’m Afraid of Flying
“Do you feel that?”
“Feel what?”
“The plane feels like it’s rocking back and forth.”
“It’s not.”
“Okay….that’s good.”
*30 seconds pass*
“Are you sure you don’t feel that?”
My girlfriend, Lauren, and I were flying home from Portland, Oregon, and our plane hadn’t even left the gate yet. It felt like the plane was see-sawing back and forth, as if a pair of sumo wrestlers were jumping up and down on each wing.
“Seriously, you don’t feel anything?”
“Babe. No. It’s fine. You’re fine.”
I was not fine.
Our plane taxied and took off. As the plane rose higher and higher, so did my heart rate. I watched Mount Hood out the window as we continued to ascend. All I could think about was how a German pilot had deliberately flown a commercial flight into the side of the French Alps a few years earlier and had convinced myself the same thing was about to happen to us. Our ascent was taking too long, and the only logical explanation was that the pilot was about to dive bomb us into the side of the mountain.
In hindsight, this is an absolutely insane and unreasonable thing to think. But in the moment, it was a stone-cold fact. You couldn’t tell me otherwise. Brains are weird.
Lauren, sensing my panic, scooted to the vacated middle seat and held my hand. It was useless. In my head, we were moments from becoming debris on the mountainside. “Flight 1070 to Kansas City” would be trending on Twitter before we knew it. As I stared at the mountain out the window a very embarrassing thing happened that pains me to write so badly that I’m drawing this very needlessly long sentence out as long as I can by using more and more pointless words before having to actually say it and oh my God here it goes.
I cried.
A single hot tear containing every ounce of my dignity, ran down my cheek.
It was at this moment that the captain came on the intercom and confirmed my suspicion: our ascent had been slower than usual. It was so we could enjoy the view of the mountain.
“My God,” I thought, “how did I become such a little bitch?”
My dad has been a pilot for United Airlines for over 30 years. He’s flown 777’s, 747’s, and 7younameit7’s, from Columbus to London to Hong Kong and everywhere in-between. He’s even owned his own private plane pretty much my entire life (less glamorous than it sounds). Growing up, my family flew everywhere all the time.
It makes sense then that most of my earliest memories are around planes. It seemed like every other weekend we were off to another airshow in some remote part of the country where my dad would wander through a maze of airplanes, inspecting EVERY SINGLE ONE as thoroughly as a detective investigating a crime scene. And there I would be by his side, complaining about my feet hurting and asking when the Blue Angels were finally going to start. I really sucked to be around, I imagine.
If a weekend wasn’t spent at an airshow it was spent at the local airport, where my dad was (and still is) a bona fide rockstar. People would greet him like Norm from Cheers at these tiny airports, greeting him by name and flocking toward him, the Bon Jovi of pilots. They would ask questions and hang on his every word as I tried to steal candy out of the broken vending machine in the corner of the lobby, clueless as to why people found my dad, who I saw every day, so interesting.
I say all that to say 1) my dad is cooler than yours and 2) my fear of flying doesn’t make any sense. And no one gets a bigger kick out of it than my dad.
A couple years ago, I was taking a trip to Washington D.C. to visit my friend, Steven, and was kind of freaking out about the flight. Okay I was 100% freaking out about the flight. (The pentagon was attacked on 9/11, remember. I’m not irrational). As a way to cope, I asked my dad to tell me something about flying that would calm me down. His answer: in all his years of flying, from age sixteen to fifty-nine, his heart rate has never once elevated from anything other than excitement during a flight.
What an incredible response. This guy’s been flying all sorts of aircraft to all sorts of places out of all sorts of airports for over 30 years, and never once has anything happened during a flight that made even a tiny part of his brain go “Oh fuck”?* He’s either a bad ass or a sociopath.
*I recounted this story with my dad recently and he laughed. “That was a lie.”
Either way, it worked! Kind of. I mean, to the extent that a piece of logical information can help when your brain is operating illogically. Now, whenever I meet someone else who’s uneasy about flying, this is my go-to piece of information I share with them. And it usually helps them, too. You know, to the extent that a logical piece of information can help when your brain is operating illogically.
This wouldn’t be the first (or last) time I asked my dad a question to make me feel better. Here are some other things he’s told me to help ease my mind at one point or another:
1. Most crashes happen within the first 30 seconds of take-off. It’s become an OCD-level practice that I count to 30 at the beginning of flights.
2. A plane has never crashed due to turbulence alone. Pilots only avoid it because it makes passengers (like me!) uncomfortable.
3. Even in the worst turbulence, a plane rarely drops more than a couple feet at a time. I told him about a flight I was on once that took off during a storm, and that at one point it felt like it dropped fifty feet in the air. “No it didn’t. It was probably two, bitch.” He didn’t say the “bitch” part, but I assume he thought it.
4. Commercial planes are incredibly effective gliders, so in the *extremely* rare event a plane loses power in all its engines, there’s still a good chance of you gliding to safety. (In 2001 a flight lost power in all of its engines over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, glided over 75 miles, and landed safely).
5. One of my biggest fears is flying overseas because if things go wrong mid-flight, they’re sure to go a whole lot more wrong quickly since there’s nowhere to land. This apparently isn’t true. There’s only one stretch over the Atlantic Ocean (or maybe Pacific, I don’t remember) where there isn’t an island within gliding distance.
6. An airplane’s wings can bend nearly 90 degrees before snapping. A plane’s wings snapping isn’t necessarily a big fear of mine, but he used it as a way to demonstrate the level of testing planes go through before being made available for public use. Although I will say this one sort of backfired because I looked up a video of a plane’s wings being tested and now I can’t get the image of them snapping out of my head.
These have all been incredibly helpful pieces of information to me when flying, and I’m lucky to have a dad who’s not only a pilot but also my part-time therapist. But ultimately, it’s like using a band aid to help someone who just got run over by a freight train full of explosives. The problem is still very much there.
Whenever I’m waiting for a flight, I look at all the people sitting at my gate and see the same thing: quintessential crash victims. If I were casting a movie where a plane crashes, I would cast all the people on all my flights ever. I can practically picture the memorial service where the airline’s company spokesperson is giving their sincerest grievances about the accident as all our faces flash behind them on a projector screen. And that’s just at the gate.
Here’s a typical thought process I go through during take-off:
This isn’t so terri- what’s that buzzing? I’ve heard buzzing on planes before but never that buzzing. Did that flight attendant just look at that other flight attendant funny? That flight attendant definitely just looked at that other flight attendant funny. Why is everyone so calm? Don’t they realize this isn’t normal? Man isn’t meant to fly. Why is that baby so quiet? What does it know that we don’t? Can babies sense death? Are we still ascending? Are we at cruising altitude? Is 40,000 feet a normal cruising altitude? 40,000 seems high for a cruising altitude. How does cabin pressure work? Wait, where’d the buzzing go? Was it supposed to stop? Is 478 mph a normal ground speed? I should have updated my will before this trip.
And of course, every single time, without fail, everything goes fine and the plane lands safely. Which is obvious, because otherwise I wouldn’t be here writing this dumb blog.*
*Lauren is scared to death of bees even though she’s never been stung by one before. So one time when she was freaking out because a bee was nearby, I told her “You aren’t allowed to be afraid of bees until one stings you” and without missing a beat she said, “You aren’t allowed to be afraid of flying until you crash.” She keeps it the realest.
So back to the question: How did I become so afraid of flying when I grew up around planes my whole life? Well, I’m pretty sure I know. Maybe.
I mentioned earlier that my dad has owned his own plane pretty much my whole life (again, less glamorous than it sounds). The plane I remember most and will always remember most is the Cessna 190. He loved that plane. Arguably more than me. He would fly it to airshows where his pilot pals who would drool over it. I guess it was a big deal, but to me it was just another plane. A plane I hated. Because it was loud and reeked of gasoline and almost killed us all.
When I was eight years old, my family was visiting my grandparents in Harrisonville, MO right before the school year started. We were set to make the three-hour flight back home to Dubuque, IA in the Cessna. My brother and I piled into the backseat of the plane where we would play our Gameboys until the batteries died, just as we did on the way there. My dad was piloting (of course) and my mom rode shotgun.
We took off no problem, but soon after we reached altitude, not even ten minutes into the flight, the engine cut out. I mentioned earlier how this plane was loud, and I mean it was LOUD. When the engine cut it was like teleporting from a factory full of buzzsaws cutting sheet metal to a silent retreat in an instant.
Before I could process what was happening, my dad got the engine started again. Everything was back to normal, other than the insane amount of nervous tension that filled the plane. And then the engine cut out again.
My mom turned around in her seat to face my brother and I. “It’s okay. We’re okay.” I’m not sure if she was trying to convince us or herself, but we weren’t buying it.
My brother and I buried ourselves under the Muppets blanket we had with us in the backseat and stared at each other in silence, nothing but the whistle of the wind occupying our eardrums. A pilot friend of our dad’s had crashed his plane and passed away not long before. I’m not sure if it crossed my mind in that moment, but it certainly loomed in my subconscious.
A few seconds (eternities) later my dad got the engine started again and to our relief decided to head back. The engine continued to cut in and out until we landed safely back in Harrisonville. My grandparents picked us up, took us to a rental car company, and we drove the 8 hours home to Iowa that night. That’s where the memory ends.*
*My dad claims this isn’t how the story goes. I have no idea how he thinks it went, but this is how I remember it. And guess what? This is my post. If he wants to tell his version (the wrong version) he can start his own blog and tell it. But it doesn’t even matter because at this point my perception has become my reality.
It’s easy to point to this event and say this is where my fear of flying all started. And on some level, it probably is. But in the immediate aftermath of that event I was totally fine. And never once as it was happening did I believe we were ever in any danger. Because my dad was flying, and my dad’s the best pilot in the world.
On March 10, 2019, a Boeing 737 MAX flight crashed in Ethiopia. It was the second crash involving this same model of aircraft within the span of six months. I was on a work trip when the second crash happened and everyone I was with started checking their flight information, making sure their plane home wasn’t one of the flying coffins. Naturally, I asked my dad about it the next time I saw him.
His answer was amazing. Not so much the answer itself, but the way he explained it. It was as if he had teleported into the cockpit. He pointed where different instruments and switches and gauges should be, explained what the pilots should have been looking for, and ultimately what they should have done to prevent the crash, which was simply flip a switch found on the right-hand side of the co-pilot’s seat.
This was, by his own admission, an extreme over-simplification. If you read about the Boeing 737 MAX crashes, there were factors at play long before that flight ever took off that contributed to the end result, including a system being implemented that most pilots aren’t trained to handle. But my dad isn’t most pilots. He always has the answer, and he always delivers it the same way I imagine Stephen Hawking robotically talked about physics, or Steve Jobs about turtlenecks.
My dad was born to fly. And while I wasn’t, sometimes just talking to him makes me feel like I was.
