Random reminder

Press, 18 March 1989, Page 37

Random reminder

TERROR FIRMA

She’ll never get used to flying. She was only five years old when her father treated her to a plane excursion, flying over the beach and city. The pilot thought he’d give his passengers the thrill of their lives by banking, then doing a complete turn-over. > She never went on a plane again until she was 45 and it was only out of necessity. She’d tramped the Heaphy track and was obliged to return to the start of the track where the car had been left. Her transport was a fourseater Cessna plane. As the weather was stormy, the pilot took the plane out to sea. She was sick when she got off it.

She feels she’s not alone in her fear, as she watches other ashen faces and tense bodies at airports. The early airport check-in leaves too long a “thinXing” slot. She buys a magazine trying to take her mind off the dreaded moment of “Take-off.” She tries starting a conversation with a neighbour as though it were an everyday occurrence and she’d been flying all her life. On the plane, she picks up the literature in the seat pocket in front of her. Unfortunately, it contains emergency procedures, increasing her anxiety. The emergency demonstration begins. “Ladies and gentlemen, please take note of your nearest emergency exit.” She hates that word “emergency.” Her throat

feels tighter and she wants to dive through the closed “emergency” door. Then a voice over the intercom.says, “In the unlikely event of an emergency” (there’s that word again,) “trust your stewardess, she knows what to do”! The plane taxis along the runway and her stomach muscles tighten. The sound of the engine changes and the plane takes off. The hostess brings a carton of orange juice. She wishes it were stronger to fortify her for the landing. Meanwhile the Captain is on the intercom. “Ladies and gentleman, we are flying today at 850 kilometres an hour,” adding the height. Thirty thousand feet up over the sea is a long drop when she can’t even swim! She thought of attending a “Fear of Flying Course” she’d seen advertised. There was a visit to an airport control tower with instructions in the use of radar; experience in a cockpit simulator to feel realistic situations of various weather conditions and ... every evening a personal visit to a psychiatrist, with all questions answered, however naive and absurd. At the end of the course, a flight would be arranged during which pupils would go into the cockpit for a party. There’s always a snag though. The biggest was she hadn’t got the price of the course and even if she had, it was in Norway. It would entail flying!