My Greatest Fear

If I had my way, I’d never fly again.

I was recently on a flight from Colorado to North Carolina to see old friends, and it may have been the longest 3 and a half hours of my life.

Oh, the first part wasn’t too bad — pretty smooth takeoff, soaring majestically into and above the clouds and heading east at 600 mph.

But just as I was starting to relax, the turbulence started.

Now, I’ve experienced turbulence before — that sudden up or down motion of the plane that I always think is the Beginning of the End.

But this time — and for the first time — I experienced sideways turbulence. Like I was inside a jar and some malevolent giant was twisting it back and forth.

Oh God.

I looked around me, but surprisingly no one was screaming. Mostly, they were blankly staring at their phones, watching their little pre-recorded programs or kicked back listening to music on their earphones.

Nope. Nobody with my wide-eyed, looks-like-its-all-over expression.

It was a little hard to accurately gauge their expressions as we were all wearing our COVID masks. But no one was frantically running up or down the aisle.

Now why, you might be saying to yourself, is this guy (me) so freaked?

Well, for one thing, I hardly ever fly, but I have flown a bit — once clear across the Atlantic to England. It was my first flight, I was only 20 at the time -- and I don’t remember anything traumatic about it.

However, since then I’ve been on several other flights with some degree of turbulence and always hated it.

But you know something? Not one of them crashed!

The other reason I have this perhaps unreasonable fear of flying is all the “Greatest Air Disaster” shows I’ve seen that describe -- in excruciating detail -- the worst that can happen.

Usually, it’s something like a nut not being sufficiently tightened on a bolt during a routine maintenance check.

And down it went…

But the good news is air travel is apparently safer than ever.

A June 2020 article on smartadvocate.com looked at all the plane crashes over the last 10 years — worldwide — and found there were 109 crashes and 3,930 deaths.

That may sound like a lot, but there were only 9 commercial air crashes in the U.S. over that 10-year period -- and the last two in 2019 had a total of only 3 deaths.

It’s like the airline folks always say: You’re far safer — statistically — flying in a big airplane than driving a car.

So OK, I get that. But for me, it’s partly about giving up control of my destiny to some pilot I’ve never met and don’t even know what he/she looks like.

Having my hands on the steering wheel and my foot near the brake just makes me feel so much safer than being 30,000 feet in the air with no parachute.

So would I rather drive from Colorado to North Carolina?

What, are you crazy?