My wife doesn’t like to fly. I hate to expose this about her, but there you have it. She is a fearful flyer. I love to fly. I love to fly as much as I love anything. There, I’ve said it. Perhaps you had guessed this about me but not known it about her and might conclude that this imbalance is not a favorable marital recipe. You might be surprised.
Cathy is a perfectly matched mate to me in almost all respects, except that we view flying very differently. She even took a fear-of-flying course complete with an airplane ride from Tampa to Orlando and back on a US Airways (she thinks) jet before we met. That she consented to marry me, given how deeply rooted her anxiety about flying is, still marvels me.
I am fearful of some things. They just don’t happen to have anything to do with airplanes, flying or engine noise. I’ve tried to let my own fears inform my understanding of her fears. I am not fond of sharks. Have I ever been threatened by a shark? No. Do I know that the statistical probability of getting attacked by a shark is impossibly minuscule? Yes. Am I reassured by this fact? No.
Cathy is a great swimmer and loves the ocean. Once she made me swim with about a thousand stingrays in the Cayman Islands. The guide had us touch the seemingly trained stingrays. One had two penises. Fascinating. All I could think about was that a bunch of great white sharks must have been patiently lurking 50 feet away. I could not get out of there fast enough. No amount of explanation or the calm countenance of the tour guide and all the happy tourists made me feel safe.
We are well suited, Cathy and I, in many respects. I’m an extrovert, and she’s a balancing introvert. I can’t imagine the sheer volume of BS that might accumulate if we were both extroverts. She has good analytical skills, and I am more of a seat-of-the-pants operator. She is organized, and I am not. I frequently ask for her help in finding something only to learn that the lost item is either already in my hand or right in front of my face. She is patient with all this, so I try to be understanding when it comes to her anxiety about flying.
I try to remember to be patient when Cathy admits that she worries that the wings or an engine will fall off. When I look at the wing of our Cheyenne, I see rivets that slow us down and look like barnacles. Paradoxically, when she sees rivets, she is reassured that the wing is strong. I try to point out that wings only fall off airplanes if they become over-stressed, which is usually when a pilot has wandered into a thunderstorm, or gotten excited and/or disoriented and applied unhealthy control forces. I reassure her that we don’t go anywhere near thunderstorms.
Climb-out seems to be scarier to her than descent and approach. I get this. I’m not sure we’re going to top a cloud deck either, and I know our rate of climb will diminish and the possibility of icing will increase as we go up. On the way down, I think she feels that she has it almost made. She even admits that the darkening sky as we descend toward a low approach makes her feel better, of all things. This is while I worry about what to do if we go missed.
I’ve looked up “fear of flying” on the Internet. This search led me to a book called exactly that: Fear of Flying, written by Erica Jong in 1973. I read the first few chapters and found nothing about the fear of flying, but I did learn about the sexual revolution of the ’60s and ’70s.
Wikipedia claims that fear of flying can be a fear of crowds (agoraphobia), fear of being in a closed metal tube (claustrophobia) or fear of heights (acrophobia). There are a lot of references to the use of pharmaceuticals to allay fear of aerial sport. Just pop a Xanax and all will be well. Interestingly, Wikipedia reported a study that found that fearful flyers who have been given Xanax on one flight had more fear on a subsequent flight than those subjects given a placebo. I guess you had to get really scared to get over being scared.
A fellow Cheyenne owner told me that having a fearful flyer sit up front with him in the cockpit can be helpful. He explains every step of the takeoff: the loud noise, the rotation and the resulting deck angle, the thump of the gear hitting the wells, the first power and prop-speed reduction. “Many are helped,” he says. “Some, not at all.”
Fear of anything, it seems to me, comes in two distinct forms. One is a wariness borne of real experience or secondhand knowledge (such as a “shark attack kills bather” story in a newspaper). The other is primal. No amount of rationalization or therapy or pharmacologic assistance can blunt the abject fear. Some wiring deep inside the brain interprets the threat as real and immediate.
Sometimes I don’t think too straight. Last week I thought I would provide a treat for Cathy. The Part 135 company I fly for allows employees and their family members to fly on empty legs. I think the CJ3 is a magnificent airplane; it’s easy to fly, economical, can always get up to Flight Level 450 and looks good on the ramp. When I saw a Bedford, Massachusetts (KBED), to Lebanon, New Hampshire (KLEB), empty leg, a distance of 82 miles, I jumped at the chance to give her the experience of a lifetime: a free private jet ride. I would fly her to KBED in our Cheyenne, and she’d fly back in the CJ3 with Steve and Rich, two careful, highly experienced pilots whom I know well. What a gift.
Except, of course, an introvert is challenged by being in a closed space with two strangers, and a fearful flyer may not think an airplane ride, no matter how short the trip or beneficent the weather, is all that great of a gift. I was giving her something that I wanted, not what she might have wanted. Haven’t we all done this at some point? Some variation of “no really, honey, I bought this truck for you.”
The weather was gorgeous and the air was smooth on the flight down to KBED. Steve and Rich were welcoming. I hustled back into the Cheyenne to get started before they did. I doubted I could beat them back to KLEB, but I’d try.
I took off IFR, leveled at 8,000 feet, and was soon instructed to expect vectors because there was a “jet coming up behind me.” The actual airport was behind a hill, but I was familiar and called it in sight. Cleared for the visual and told that the jet was flying the RNAV approach, I knew I’d be in a position to film their arrival, which I did on a smartphone. Oblivious to how the flight might have seemed to her, I was expectant as they taxied in.
On debrief and review of the video Cathy took from inside the jet on takeoff, it was obvious how frightening the 15-degree nose-up attitude was. “I felt like I might slide out the back of the airplane and they’d never even know I was missing,” she said.
Some fears can be ameliorated by acculturation. Fly often enough and it gets better. Some people respond to fear by overcompensating. An example might be a person with a fear of heights becoming a high-wire aerialist. I think psychiatrists call this “counterphobia.” Cathy did, in fact, solo years ago. Though she did it to please me, she basically hated the experience. Some basic fears are so deeply imbedded in the base of our brains that no amount of repetitive desensitization or drugs will make a substantive difference.
My take-home lesson is this: Every time Cathy and I fly together, she is giving me a gift. Flying is something I love and she finds challenging. When thinking about all this, I go back to a quote attributed to Gen. George Patton: “Never take counsel of your fears.” Easy for him to say.
