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H I G H A N X I E T Y
Confessions of an increasingly fearful flyer.
BY DWIGHT GARNER
let me put this as baldly as possible: I hate to fly. I dread it for weeks before I step on a plane -- helpless weeks I spend scanning weather charts, scouring the New York Times for tiny headlines about foreign crashes, probing my own life for ominous portents. Once I'm up in the air, barring a sunny and turbulence-free flight, I tend to stare out the window, bug-eyed and twitchy, until I'm back on God's green earth again. This is a pesky problem, and I've frequently sought help. I've popped pharmaceutically incorrect quantities of Xanax, Valium and Dramamine. I've bellied up to the bar beforehand to consume small oceans of red wine and beer, knocking back the occasional shot of Nyquil as a kind of in-flight boilermaker. I've flipped through shelves of (scary) self-help books that contain chapters on rituals, good-luck charms and "systematic desensitization." A few years ago, I felt my phobia so acutely that I hopped on a flight to Dallas to enroll in an airline disaster survival course called Traveling With Confidence Plus, a kind of Outward Bound for paranoids. I didn't do this because I plan to actually survive a crash someday. (I'd rather pop a cyanide pill while we're spiraling downward, thank you very much.) I went because I wanted to act out my worst fears and, ideally, slap them down to some kind of manageable level. In short, I wanted an exorcism. I almost got one. The class took place in a remote warehouse, where the cabin section of a DC-8 had been installed. My classmates were 10 or 12 doughy middle-management types, and together we spent a few electrifying hours practicing to be heroes: We ripped out emergency exits, helped passengers onto wings, slid down plastic escape chutes. The special effects were ghoulishly great: The cabin pitched violently (four beefy guys were standing outside, rocking it) and it filled up with fake smoke while "flight attendants" screamed things like "Brace! Brace! Brace!" We each felt like Jeff Bridges in "Fearless." I learned some other things in Dallas, such as what you should never wear on a flight: synthetics, which burn too easily; neckties, which choke; hair spray, which is flammable; nerd packs, which can poke your eyes out -- the list is fairly endless and, to my mind, faintly ridiculous. I also learned, for the thousandth time, just how irrational my fear is. But knowing that you're more likely to be hit by an asteroid than perish on a jumbo jet isn't the same thing as feeling that fact in your gut. I walked away from Traveling With Confidence Plus feeling somewhat more capable and alert. But within a year or so, I was back to my old white-knuckled self -- a guy who walks onboard with a stack of bad magazines (People, Us, In Style) because all he can do at 37,000 feet is look at pictures. Things have gotten worse, recently, for people like me. 1996 was a memorably gruesome year for air disasters, and the roughly 15 million other Americans who hate to fly were probably as riveted by these blood baths as I was. I've got a tightly edited mental newsreel of last year's bust-ups, one that I'd like to shake but can't: the ValuJet flight that vanished into the muck in Florida (110 dead); the TWA explosion over Long Island (230 dead); the midair collision near New Delhi (349 dead); Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's crash in the Croatian mountains; the hijacked Ethiopian jetliner that skimmed to a crash landing in the Indian Ocean (120 dead). Then there's the recent news that military pilots like to play chicken with the passenger planes that cross their paths. Like a lab rat who can't help whacking the cocaine switch, I'd flick on CNN five or six times a day, craving updates. I suspect I'm not the only fearful flyer who picks at his psychic scabs -- or who suddenly finds he's cobbled together an absurdly large amount of information about things like wind-shear, slats deploy, counterfeit airline parts, 30-year-old planes, outdated computer systems, hydraulic failures and jammed rudders. And we're all probably about to know a lot more: According to a recent issue of The Economist, Boeing has predicted that, because of the increasing number of flights in the world and the poor safety records in some countries, there may be as many as one major crash a week by 2010. Not surprisingly, the culture industry is tapping into the spreading panic. Michael Crichton's new novel, "Airframe" (first printing: 1.5 million copies), is a sleekly designed thriller about the airline industry's woes. The disaster film "Turbulence" finally hit theaters a few weeks ago (and vanished instantly) after being delayed for months in the wake of the TWA crash. And perhaps most perversely, late-night television is suddenly brimming with ads for a violent series of videos called "The Challenge of Flight." Crammed with hurdy-gurdy disaster footage, these 60-second spots feel like promotions for aeronautic snuff films. I initially tried to resist this onslaught: I didn't dial the "Challenge of Flight" 1-800 number; I didn't poke my nose in the galley of the Crichton book that landed with a thunk on my doorstep; and God knows I wasn't tempted by the idea of sitting through another excruciating Ray Liotta movie. (Talk about downward spirals.) But last weekend I suddenly and rather inexplicably gave in. When you can't expel your fears, you often want to wallow in them, and I was ready for a bulimic's binge of vicarious carnage. The sorry truth is, I am helpless in the path of stories about crumpled tin. Because books are the first place I tend to look, in moments of psychic dread, for consolation and for advice about what Henry James called "How to Live," I've often regretted that James himself never had the opportunity to write about being strapped into a window seat of a 737 during an ice storm. (Perhaps the real reason Isabel Archer "had seen very little of the evil of the world" is because she didn't have to circle Heathrow for an hour before setting foot in the Old World.) As it happens, however, you don't have to look hard in recent American lit for small nuggets of wisdom about coping with your airline paranoia. Calvin Trillin keeps his flights in the air, he claims, by superstitiously not setting his watch to the local time until after he's landed. In her short story collection "Like Life," the preternaturally wise Lorrie Moore advocates humbleness in the face of an airplane's roaring hubris: "Tell yourself you had nothing to live for anyway, so that when the plane crashed it was no big deal. Then, when it didn't crash, when you had succeeded in keeping it aloft with your own worthlessness, all you had to do was stagger off, locate your luggage, and, by the time a cab arrived, come up with a persuasive reason to go on living." Whenever I'm on a particularly choppy flight, or circling JFK (again) in a thunderstorm, I also tend to recall a wonderfully absurd moment in Nicholson Baker's novel "Room Temperature." Baker's hero is on a plane that has lost power and is rapidly sinking toward earth, and he suddenly thinks to shout out: "Turn your air vents to full, people!" Everyone reaches up and twists them on, and the plane glides down under the gentle air power. This is a fantasy, of course -- but I'm not entirely convinced that, in a moment of panic, I wouldn't give it a shot. Michael Crichton will never produce a novel that's on par with anything Lorrie Moore or Nicholson Baker have written. But the great thing about Crichton -- and the reason I'd grab one of his potboilers from a paperback rack before anything by King or Steele or Grisham or Collins -- is that he has a true obsessive's fetish for facts. Crichton's new novel is choked with easy-to-swallow information, not just about why disasters happen, but about such matters as deregulation, unions, the negotiations behind airplane construction contracts, arguments about the FAA's effectiveness, you name it. For someone with a morbid fascination about the airline industry, "Airframe" is a warm, dumb, inviting place to snort around in for a few hours. "Airframe" opens with a breathless disaster scene and soon devolves into something more like a standard suspense novel. A jumbo jet en route from Hong Kong to Denver mysteriously begins to "porpoise" -- to ascend and then descend rapidly -- tossing its passengers and crew around like ice cubes in a martini shaker. (Four are killed; everyone else merely pukes.) The plane lands safely, and the action shifts to employees at a Boeing-like company called Norton, which manufactured the aircraft. Norton needs to suss out what caused this puzzling event (the foreign pilots aren't talking) before fears about their planes scuttle a major overseas sale. While I quickly lost interest in "Airframe's" plot (Crichton spends most of the book's second half hamfistedly skewering the media), I kept turning the pages for the same reason most readers will: to learn what really makes that jet leap around in the sky. I can't rid myself of the idea that the more I know about crashes -- even those that occur in a damn Michael Crichton novel -- the more easily I can will an airplane to stay in the air. Like almost every fearful flyer, my phobia has a lot to do with my inability to surrender control to someone I don't know. Perversely, I am convinced that if I myself were the pilot, my fears would vanish instantly. In fact, I'd do barrel rolls. This fantasy/nightmare of suddenly finding oneself at the helm of a jetliner is frequently exploited in airplane disaster narratives; it's among the genre's hoariest conventions. The Ray Liotta B-movie "Turbulence" has a certain amount of fun with the scenario. Liotta plays an accused serial rapist who, with another prisoner, escapes from authorities while aboard a jumbo jet. (They're being extradited to L.A. to stand trial.) Before you know it, every cop and every pilot on board is full of bullet holes, and Liotta is fighting it out with a plucky flight attendant (Lauren Holly) for control of the plane. There are some wildly -- and unintentionally -- funny moments here in which the hapless Holly flies the utterly fake-looking plane through billboards and skims hotel rooftops. (She looks like Gilligan at the wheel of the S.S. Minnow.) Even better are the scenes in which Liotta gleefully crawls through the plane's bowels trying to disconnect the auto pilot while Holly struggles with the controls. At one point, things look so bad that an Oliver North-like government baddie decides to shoot the plane down before it crashes in the heart of central L.A. He shouts: "She can't land that plane! She's a stewardess!" The hilariously would-be feminist response comes immediately from a woman across the control room: "She's not a stewardess! She's a flight attendant!" Unlike more than a few people in the audience, I didn't stalk out of "Turbulence." But I did feel like hitting the eject button on the "Challenge of Flight" video that arrived in the mail a few days later. The commercials for these crash-a-thons, sold by a group called "U.S Fighter Squadrons, Inc.," have been in heavy rotation on late-night television recently, and I ordered the first in the series. Titled "Final Approach," it features a gruesomely burning plane on its back cover with the following pitch line: "There's a time when the only thing you have left is the ejection seat." It takes a lot of crashes (and near crashes) to pad out an hourlong video like this one, and there's something a little disconcerting about the idea that some disaster hound is out there avidly gathering this footage. In fact, there may be more people keeping track than we realize. At the Traveling With Confidence Plus class in Dallas, our instructor proudly showed us a reel from her private collection -- images of commercial airline mishaps culled from dozens of television news broadcasts over the years. (It certainly set the mood.) Unlike that Traveling With Confidence Plus video, "Final Approach" disappointingly doesn't feature much contemporary material -- it's comprised almost entirely of very old military footage, much of it dating back to World War II. While watching pilots valiantly coping with botched takeoffs and landings can be compelling, disasters in small military planes simply don't have the same gravitas as a bad situation in a commercial airliner. (Although it is reassuring that, in nearly all of the crash scenes, you can see the pilots ejecting in a quick little puff of white smoke just prior to impact.) The most disconcerting thing about "Final Approach" may be that it has almost no narration or narrative coherence -- it's essentially a series of poorly edited reels stripped together with a boinky electronic soundtrack that vaguely resembles those in porno quickies. Unwittingly, this soundtrack does perform a salutary service, however: It makes you feel guilty about your own creepy interest. Regardless of what steps I take in the future -- therapy on one hand, further attempted exorcisms on the other -- my airplane phobia is unlikely to dissipate anytime soon. In the meantime, I've decided that perhaps it's time to begin badgering the FAA to enact some new regulations to help people like me. Here are a few proposals:
Now that I think about it, I'd trade all these demands for one final one: "For an additional fee, passengers can be anesthetized for the duration of the flight."
Ready to confess your worst fears of air travel and recommend your favorite remedies for planephobia? Join the discussion in Table Talk. |
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