Flight Deck November 25, 2007
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Miscellany , trackbackMyTravel pilot Pablo Mason has been fired for allowing a footballer with a fear of flying onto the flight deck. In these days when fear is the dominant theme of all activity to do with commercial flight, that is perhaps reasonable, but we have surely lost something.
In the eighties I had an appalling fear of flying. My job involved travelling around New Zealand by air for a large computer consultancy, so this was a huge problem. I lived in Wellington, where the airport has a short runway which is notorious for high winds and difficult landings, and occasionally passed out on landing when the brain decided that it really didn’t want anything to do with this unnatural and terrifying way of getting around.
These days, I’m a relaxed flyer, although I avoid it now for environmental reasons. I love the sensation of being up in the air, above the clouds with the world speeding by below. For that, I thank the pilots of Ansett New Zealand, who frequently let me up onto the flight deck, to sit in the jump seat behind them for the landing. I realised that the plane which feels like its bouncing around all over the sky is in fact heading straight for the runway and, with the wider view from the cockpit, is not moving around as much as it feels from the back. I learned to appreciate the calm, competent way that pilots work and to understand that there’s little dangerous about landing in a storm or strong wind. I’ve landed in thunderstorms, been on the last flight in before the airport was closed for bad weather, been through a ‘touch and take’ aborted landing and now there is little that worries me on a normal commercial flight.
My fear of flying was always about a lack of understanding and loss of control. Being able to see what was going on, combined with a few flying lessons (not, I hasten to add, in a commercial jet) and some mental techniques for dealing with fear, gave me the understanding I needed to turn fear into excitement and removed a crippling phobia. If I was to go through that now, it would be much more difficult to overcome.
Comments»
no comments yet - be the first?