Fearless flying??

I’ve been scared of flying as long as I can remember. Every turbulent shake of the plane causes me to white knuckle my seat and hold my breath to the point that I become dizzy. Both my annoyingly level-headed husband and father remind me of air travel’s impressive safety record, particularly compared to car travel, and both (somewhat jokingly) suggest that I wouldn’t find air travel quite so daunting if I hadn’t bypassed physics in high school. And college. But to me, it’s just not natural for a several ton chunk of metal to fly through the sky. As I like to tell Dan, I’d rather get 10 simultaneous root canals than fly any day. He laughs but knows I am entirely serious.

Thanks to a wonderful book I read several years ago, intended to calm scaredy pants fliers like me, I’ve learned a few tricks to calm myself down when flying. One particularly helpful technique is “the jelly”: when turbulence hits, instead of seizing up my entire body, grabbing the seat for dear life, and stopping breathing (never a good idea), I place my arms lightly at my side and let my body roll with the turbulence while breathing deeply. This trick has worked wonders to relax my body, although my brain continues to tell me crazy thoughts (“We’re going down! We’re going down!” over and over). Sure, my fellow passengers probably think I’m a bit of a nut, doing yoga-style breaths in my seat, but I can guarantee they’ll like me more like this than crying like a baby and madly clutching the hands of strangers sitting beside me.

That said, I like traveling much too much to allow my (admittedly irrational) fear of flying to interfere with my desire to see different parts of the world. Now that I’m living in Oz, I have no option but to fly if I want to go anywhere. Getting here in the first instance took about 22 hours of flying between Vermont and Sydney, and traveling around Australia itself is no quick jaunt either. Many people, including myself, initially have no concept of how big this country/continent is and that you have to hop onto a flight to get to many locales. Dan and I also hope to explore Asia while we're here, and nothing is much closer than a seven-hour flight. And now that I’m a mom, I am intent on putting on a brave face for Sydney each time that we fly, even pretending that turbulence is fun. (“Wee, Sydney, it’s a rollercoaster!” while I vomit inside my mouth.)

My (lack of) enthusiasm for flying has not been helped by Qantas having no less than four planes almost go down/face precarious situations since I arrived here not even four weeks ago. Two flights had well-publicized engine problems on November 4^th and 5^th; on November 15^th, a Qantas flight bound for Buenos Aires had to return to Sydney after it suffered an electrical fault that caused smoke to pour into the cockpit; and on November 16^th, a flight was struck by lightning soon after takeoff on its way from Alice Springs to Darwin, Australia. Yikes!

Tomorrow Dan, Syd, and I get back onto a plane for a fifteen-hour flight to San Francisco, where we are spending Thanksgiving week with my brother, my sister in law, and my folks. While admittedly it’s crazy to go back to the States after being here just a month, we planned this trip about a year ago and I’ve committed to another 30 hours of air travel. I don’t know how much solace to find in the fact that we’re not flying Qantas, as I’d like to think that that poor airline’s slew of bad luck has got to end soon.

Please send warm wishes for a smooth, uneventful flight there and back for us, and happy Thanksgiving!