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I have a business trip to the Knoxville office tomorrow. I fire up the browser to check the weather and see this headline:

Air traffic resumes over Nashville after communications failure

I have a love/hate relationship with flying. When I was a kid, dad would fly the family around the country for vacations every summer. Getting on the plane, the acceleration of takeoff, having your own private a/c vent and reading light and a waitress to bring you snacks and cokes? Pretty much the coolest stuff ever.

Between the ages of ~10 and 23, I didn’t fly a single time. As childhood memories are wont to do, I remembered the cool stuff about flying and forgot all of the bad, which set up my first flight as an adult to be quite memorable. If you are a frequent flier, you are no doubt familiar with the climb profile of most commercial planes. Jets use full thrust during takeoff and the initial climb, until they retract the flaps about a minute into the flight. At which point, they reduce thrust to about 50% for the rest of the climb. The result of lowering the thrust is that the plane suddenly goes from climbing very quickly, to climbing very gradually. The effect you feel is akin to the feeling when a fast elevator reaches the top floor of a building. You get a bit of butterflies in your stomach and the sensation of falling. Why? Because your rate of acceleration changes from fast to slower, which your body equates to falling. I’m not making this up. Try it yourself.

Needless to say, I didn’t remember this detail from my days flying as a kid. When it happened, my thought process was something like this: I have flown a lot as a kid, I understand planes and how flying works. I do *NOT* remember this sensation of falling happening just after takeoff during my previous flights. I’ve read that the most likely time for an airplane crash to occur is just after takeoff or just before landing. Therefore, something is wrong with the airplane, and OMFG I’M GOING TO DIE THE FKING PLANE IS CRASHING.

My body dumped a huge surge of adrenaline into my system and I went into panic mode for a few minutes until I realized the plane wasn’t crashing after all.

It took me a good 10 years to get comfortable with flying again. I know it was an irrational fear, and I know source of my anxiety was that bad episode, but it didn’t matter. For a while there I was taking Xanax before flights and Jack and coke during. Now, I travel so much that I’m jaded to the whole thing and usually have no problems. But headlines like the one quoted above don’t help.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 7:59 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.