Warning: I realized after writing this there is a lot of data here.. And this turned more into a story than a blog entry. :) This is probably a 20 minute read, so caution!
It seems lately I've found myself on a lot of flights with quite a few fearful travelers. I can completely empathize because not all that long ago (well okay 19 years ago, but it seems like yesterday) I had to take my first business trip - curled up in the fetal position crying my eyes out certain I was to meet my death that day. Having a crush on the gentleman you are traveling with doesn't exactly help the situation either - it's pretty hard to look cool when you are scared to death.
A few steps back before a few steps forward…
Why on Earth was I so afraid? I was working for a statistician at the time who did his best to help me, without success. I have vague memories of my only flight as a kid, parents and brother with, flying to four islands in Hawaii. With already-overprotective parents and a mother scared to death of flying you can only imagine the things discussed on this flight.. How to hold your head in crash position and "I hope the rivets on this plane door do not come off like on that DELTA flight leaving Honolulu." (When I was a kid, the mantra was DELTA stood for "Don't Ever Leave the Airport"). I don't blame my parents, they were afraid too.
At 17, I was a Technology Director and Stats Advisor while still in High School - and I had to fly to Michigan to take part in a global presentation on Information Technology and talk about what our University was doing that the others might benefit from. I remember laying awake nearly a week before taking that flight, wondering first how I could get out of it, second how I'd ever conquer this fear, and third that I would die - or maybe I could just resign first.
Quite literally. I was completely numb with fear to a point of being unable to function. I called in sick every day that week to work. Not long after my college boyfriend and I were on a trip to Arizona and he wanted to .. Ahh.. Fly! When the plane swung from wind sheer I literally screamed out loud. Thankfully being a super nice guy he just held my hand but the others on the plane wondered what the heck was wrong with me. This continued for some years, and as I boarded a flight in Paris to head back to LA (another terrible experience - GETTING THERE!) the Concord crashed on the runway behind me. We had to wait 4 hours for experts to "clear the runway" to make sure debris didn't cause the crash before we could leave. I spent the next 18 hours staring at the GPS to make sure that our altitude hadn't dropped without my awareness while everyone else slept and jumping at every slight bump along the way. I had images of fiery engines and wings coming off in every area of my brain and it was overwhelming.
So when I say I can empathize with these passengers, I mean it. I never understood how my boyfriends' parents traveled the world without a care in that same world.
I met a freaked out passenger on my very last flight that asked me to write about (and then email him) the way that I "got over it" and I realized that so many people struggle with the same thing, "why not post about it and get others to share their tips too". And now, you are reading this blog doing precisely that. :)
I told this man, Dan, that the key was forcing myself to realize the fear was irrational and then take action on it. His response? "flying in a tin can at 650mph and being afraid of it isn't irrational." Good point - sort of. Emotionally he's right, but using physics and math? He's wrong. I continued… after realizing I had no choice but to fly anyway so I might as well get used to it, I did what any crazy chick trying to overcome a fear would do after growing up in an overprotective household where every time you had to conquer a fear you had to push it to its limits to see "worst case" - do it to an extreme so that you have no choice but to see the worst of the worst - which will make the "average" seem so easy. Yes, I use this method a lot for various things. :)
Step 1 was to fly in little planes with a man that was like a cat on his 8th life. A private pilot that often flew IFR with a VFR license (when that wasn’t suspended) was my boss at my night job while in college (as opposed to the day job I wrote about above) and he flew a lot to Catalina Island (dubbed the aircraft landing strip for VERY good reason - Google it sometime!) and liked to graze mountains in an open-top plane and then stall the motor on purpose to watch mag lights float in the air at 0g's. Sometimes he would follow dirt bikers through the hills at 200 feet above ground - I'm not kidding. We would "wing the water", 30 feet above ground, and try to get out of there before someone gave the FAA his wing number. He was as extreme as extreme gets. And I flew with him every time I had a chance to, scared to death, and yes crying and yelling sometimes. Even hitting him wildly out of pure fear for an hour at a time. He laughed through the whole thing. How could he laugh when I couldn't function -- and then why did I continue to get on that plane? I was NOT having a good time. I had to.
So I continued, afraid. That is.. Until I took the stick. About a year later, not only did I know how to fly these little planes, but I loved every second of it. I loved stalling, I loved recovering, I loved it when we lost the fuel pump on take off and had to go to Plan B, and loved it when I would fly over my parents house at 2000 feet and call them from my brick-sized cell phone and tell them to look outside to try to freak my mother out. I was 20...21, and knew what it felt like to fly in IFR rules without even a VFR license (only a student license) not able to see even 20 meters in front of you, and to have your "instructor" (if you could call him that) say "shit! That's a mountain, holy crap where did THAT come from?" and then veer hard to the right at a stall angle… only to.. Stall, with a mountain right below. You haven't lived until that has happened - or you lose your landing gear on approach while the Ontario, CA airport tower is screaming at you in your headset and the real pilot is trying to jump into your seat so keep you out of trouble.
Never in a million years did I think that not only would I find that to be a blast with some damn funny stories to tell after, but most vitally? It would help me lose my fear of flying. Like truly, madly, deeply gone. What would American Airlines do that could POSSIBLY be worse than what he and I did in that plane? Absolutely nothing. (this guy didn’t have a drivers license, he lost it to reckless endangerment, so he had to fly to work, by the way.) Yes, head case.
So what happened to that 40's vintage plane without the top that soon became my favorite one to fly? He crashed it into a muddy ravine in Central California and it died a slow painful death as mud filled all the gears and open spaces. :( RIP. My friend got out of the mud and used his handheld GPS back in the day when they were the size of a backpack to get to a payphone 15 hours away. He still hadn't used up his lives. I think he's at 8.5 and counting.
Back to Dan and this recent flight. I was assuming Dan didn't want to take that much risk - but I had to tell him the story anyway so he could see that 1) planes can handle an incredible amount of force - in fact our limbs would come apart, as I told him, before the wings did from g forces (he didn't seem to think that was helpful) and are designed to do so, and 2) it could be much worse than a steady 37000 feet for 7 hours at 675 mph. Even if it is a flying tin can.
Now I teach stats, econ, and technology, and needless to say the statistics come in handy. So before I spent the rest of the flight telling Dan what each noise was (a big fear if you are afraid to fly and the Bose just don't block the sound and the Valium just hasn't kicked in) let me first tell you the same statistics I told Dan. There are many ways to calculate them so here are a few.
The odds of dying in a plane crash are about 1 in 22.8 million in the 90s; now roughly stated as 1 in 34 million. You would, statistically speaking, have a greater chance of winning the lottery twice than dying in a plane crash. Fatality rates are about 90% if your plane does crash. (okay that last point probably didn't help my case)
From the book Truly Mad Statistics, more people die in the US in six months in cars than in the air in the last 100 years.
There are about 36 crashes per year according to the NTSB. Here is a link to the NTSB's aviation accident log:
http://www.ntsb.gov/aviation/aviation.htm and here is a table of accidents you can download:
http://www.ntsb.gov/aviation/Stats.htm
Do you want to see stats from one place to another or on a specific carrier? http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/query.asp
IF air travel was only as safe as a car, a plane with 120 passengers would crash every single day of the year with no survivors.
A high crash rate was in 1994 with 239 people dying. 2.5 million Americans died that year total, 700,000 of heart disease and 500,000 of cancer. How many from medical screw-ups? 50,000 (now up at about 100,000 with prescription errors). (side note: I've yet to face my fear of surgery/hospitalization/anesthesia, partly because of these odds even though yes, they are small too! That I'm sure will come another day.. I'm just not sure how "extreme anything" will help me prepare LOL)
At any given time over the US alone, there are about 5000 planes in the air. Large aircraft. This doesn't include private planes or jets.
Highest risk flights are short flights in developing countries. Even there the odds are about 1 in 500,000.
The US Bureau of Transportation Stats calculates fatalities per million miles traveled. Car 9.3, Train 5, commercial flights 1.22. Flying is 8 times safer than driving.
Here is a link by year showing a graph of accidents:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/planecrash/risk-02.html
Pilots can't avoid pre-checks like drivers can. They can't use old unmaintained equipment like drivers can. They are forced to retire if there is a chance they can't see, and they are given tests often to make sure they're up to date on their procedures. Want to see how safe it is to be a pilot? http://www.bls.gov/opub/cwc/archive/spring2000brief1.pdf Far safer than in construction, in timber, a farmer, a truck driver, etc...
What should you be more worried about? The ride to the airport, not the ride once you get there.
Still, easier said than done if your fear is crippling you. In some cases it's the loss of control and lack of visibility into what is happening, at least it was for me. Remember this though. You'd have to ride on a plane every day of your life and still wait an average of 26,000 years to die in one.
Take a look at Greenspun's General Aviation Safety write up - great stats with fascinating stuff http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/safety
So what about those noises? I'll run through some of them - some that were the worst for me and were the worst for Dan and many other passengers. If you are afraid to fly, print this part out and take it with you. Even book a seat just in front of or just behind the wing or engines so you can see the movement, too.
1. Before takeoff, the AC and lights may go off and back on. This is when the pilot changes power sources from the generator to an internal source.
2. While the plane is making its way to the runway, or taxiing, parts of the wing will move down and back. This is partly a test, and partly to get ready for take off when the flaps have to extend to provide more lift. Lesson 101 from pilot school: lift has to be greater than weight (gravity) to take off. Lift puts pressure upward to make the plane go up, weight or gravity puts pressure downward to make the plane go down.
3. Right after take off, floor panels shake or make noise. This is the landing gear coming up.
4. While climbing up during take off, the sound of the engine goes down, as though the engines are winding down. I remember this being one of the scariest sounds. It's normal! The engines go to lower power outputs after the initial full throttle for take off. This is because during flight, thrust of the aircraft has to exceed drag caused by wind, air, pressure and so on. You don't need full throttle to maximize this, you just have to tweak out your controls to the optimal point. (The engines also go to "idle power" just before you start to descend, so that is another time you might feel "power loss".
5. During the climb, there is a change in the tone of the aircraft. Sometimes it sounds like "vr vr vr vr"… yeah good description huh? This is especially true on older aircraft. (and yes, well maintained older aircraft are very safe. No one has ever died from an accident on Southwest Airlines and they have some of the oldest aircraft period). This is a sound that the flaps make as they retract. You will hear it as they extend, and as you land.
6. Flashing lights. These are usually strobe lights on the wing tips that reflect off the clouds. Sometimes it's lightning but even if that happens and worst case your plane is hit (rare but it does happen and it's happened on one my flights), in almost all cases nothing catastrophic happens to the plane.
7. Wings move up and down and there are turbulence. They are designed to withstand many G's. They wont just come off. Your body will rip limb from limb first. Seriously. Nice mental picture, huh? If the wings come off, you won't even know. ;)
8. Landing produces a hard blowing sound and sometimes more engine sound. To stop, engines often use thrust reverser which redirect air forward to slow the plane. Normal!
And of course there is landing with pulsing brakes. This is much like the braking systems your car uses and they help control skidding. The length of the runway also impacts how intense your landing will be.
According to AA, I have flown over 2 million miles and I'm in my 30s.. And that is one airline. While I still think they are wrong, I'm guessing they'd air on their side and not mine if they were. That doesn’t count all the no-name airlines, the overseas airlines, the small plane trips, the airlines where I haven't checked.. So many millions of miles. I've had a large plane from Chicago into Charlotte lose power because it was struck by lightning, touch and go's in Miami that required diversion to Ft. Myers and bunches of other exciting things happen on flights.. Including just this past weekend simple stuff like a 777 tug overshooting the bridge and pushing back the plane 2 feet. Eventually it's all fun, and you come to enjoy your flight time as a way to get away from the cell phones (though I am liking GoGo a lot). After you start seeing the world and living with other cultures for weeks or months in a year all thanks to a 17 hour flight somewhere, you realize the fear is worth getting over. And it's pretty interesting to see that Air China departs without requiring the pilots shut the door sometimes and that they leave bags laying around "wherever" (not to mention those cool temperature sensors to see if you have h1n1), and which airlines don't have the stupid rules about having cell phones off (because NO, it does NOT cause planes to crash!) and all sorts of various random things you learn.
So if you are afraid to fly, I hope this helps. And if you aren't, thanks for laughing WITH me and not AT me (I hope?) :=)
Dani
