A Wee Little Ramble on Air Travel

Statistically, air travel is the safest way to get around this lonely rock. One could reasonably argue that it is more dangerous to walk to the corner store from your second floor apartment, as the combination of stairs and sidewalk are statistically far more dangerous to your livelihood than stepping on an airplane. However, that doesn’t provide the balm we all seek. 

I’ve been flying since before I could walk. By the age of 5 I’d already racked up a good dozen flights around the world as the child of diplomats. Flying on planes is literally in my bones. Despite this, after a particularly jarring flight to Lamu - a tiny archipelago off the coast of Kenya - in a tiny, rattling 8-seater in 2007, I developed a fear of flying. 

My younger sister is an especially anxious flyer, on every intercontinental flight we’ve taken together over the decades she pops a couple sleeping pills to negotiate the anxiety of being suspended in a vacuum tube hurtling across the sky thousands of kilometers in the air. For some reason the pills don’t work for me, and I am stuck enviously glaring at all the sleeping people around me, praying that this bout of turbulence won’t lead us to the series premiere of Lost. 

That is the wild thing about flying. It’s something that we totally take for granted. Ever since the first human looked up at a bird with some mixture of envy and fear, humanity has been fascinated by the idea of flight. From Icarus to Da Vinci, our culture is littered with a variety of rudimentary attempts at levitation. I think we often forget that the Wright Brothers made their famous flight just over a hundred years ago in 1903. The powered “heavier-than-air” aircraft. 

The history of air travel since that wild invention is littered with mishaps, accidents and tragedies. Because, when you take a step back, as a casual consumer and passive flyer, you realise how frankly insane and absurd flying actually is. How many of us can explain how flight works? Something to do with drag? And wind and lift? Aerodynamics and momentum? But it works, right? I can hop on a plane, hurtle across the atmosphere and end up on another continent in a few hours. And absurdly, despite my anxiety, it's safer than any other form of transportation. 

So then, why does flying make so many people anxious? And why don’t those same anxieties apply to driving? Or, frankly, staircases? (approximately 12,000 people a year die on staircases in America)  

I suspect it has something to do with control. When walking, we feel in control of ourselves. When driving, we have learned to feel in control of the car, and to have it respond to our desires. When flying, we can’t even fathom how it's happening, let alone process the reality that we’re moving at nearly 1000 kilometers an hour, 30,000 feet in the sky. (bless us here in Canada, kilometers and feet.)

But here’s the rub. When we hop on a train or a ferry, we don’t feel the same sense of dread or anxiety. At least not to the same extent as we do on an airplane. We’re not in control of the train, we’re not piloting the ferry. And yet, it feels fine. 

What’s really happening here? Humans are notoriously bad at risk-assessment when its something they do frequently. We learned to walk as children, we walk everywhere. We learned to walk up and down stairs as children. Stairs are everywhere. And since we are so familiar with walking up and down stairs, we don’t perceive them as risky. An airplane, on the other hand, feels very risky, because it's not something we do very often. And it feels unnatural. We’ve been floating on craft on water for tens of thousands of years, and we’ve been pulled along the ground at speed at least since we domesticated pack animals thousands of years ago. Flying? Barely a hundred years old.

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