a personal memory of airplanes, airports, and the fear of flying

35,000 feet above the ground. Delta Air Lines, Paris Charles de Gaulle to Detroit Metropolitan. Six hours layover, then SF.

I love airplanes. I had the luck of flying since I was born. I technically lived in three different countries and two different continents by the time I was 2 yo, not that I remember anything obviously.

I have always been fascinated by them. What struck me as a child was that these things are heavy, really heavy, yet still up in the air. It still strikes me today. I understand the theory of how they do it, I have read the wikipedia page maybe 10 times and watched at least as many videos on youtube. Also, when I put my hand out of the window while in a car I can see with my own eyes that I need to stay careful, or otherwise my hand will fly away. Or better, it will be lifted.

Yet, I don’t really, really get it.

It’s much easier for me to get the non-existence of time before the big bang.My dad would ask “yeah but what about before?”, and I would confidently shrug my shoulders and say “why even the question? The whole concept of universe didn’t exist at all, it just… wasn’t. There was no time before time”.He never agreed with me.

I dreamt about being in one of those movie-like scenes where the captain would show the kid inside the cockpit. I later discovered that this was going to be quite unlikely after the attack on the Twin Towers. It’s a pity, I would have touched all the buttons and flipped all the switches. Fuck yes, I’d still do it today.

About this can’t-get-into-cockpit law tho, something fishy in here. This guy was invited inside the cockpit as a tourist and he even recorded the whole thing. I wish I had been that guy.

My dad moved back to Indonesia (funny story: he, Italian, moved back to Indonesia, my mom, Indonesian, remained in Italy) and I traveled there twice a year. We mostly flew Singapore Airlines, either from Amsterdam, Milan Malpensa, or Rome Fiumicino.

Singapore Airlines and the Middle East airlines are in my experience the only ones who maintain the glamour of flying of the 70s and 80s. Relatively speaking of course. You don’t smoke cigars in business (not that I ever flew in, so maybe they do smoke cigars?!) nor do the pilots or the crew walk around the airport as if they were a group of many Leonardo di Caprios.To me glamour is receiving a bounty snack (chocolate and coconut) and coming back after 30 minutes to ask for another. The atmosphere, the kindness, the smiles, the services, the love is there.Love is surely not there when flying British Airways.

The Singapore Changi Airport was amazing. Was because today is just out of the world. My dad lived in Lombok, so our options were either to fly to Bali (then sleep there one night, and depart the day after) or wait 9 hours for the connecting flight by SilkAir and fly directly to Mataram. I was so happy when we chose the latter.

My mom, in typical Indonesian fashion, was super comfortable in letting her 10 yo kid roam around one of the biggest airports in the world and see him after two hours, no questions asked (my dad, on the contrary, would freak out in similar situations but then flex with his friends that I was an independent boy. Parents…).It was a dream. I enjoyed standing in front of the huge glass walls, facing the jet bridge, and watching the personnel preparing the plane. My favorite areas were the ones where you could connect to the local computers and visit wikipedia. In another area, you had free massaging chairs. You had also an indoor forest with fish and tropical trees.

My favorite hunt was looking for the 747, I flew one only once. My mom brought me upstairs, and I was both excited and disappointed. Excited because wow I was on the deck of the airplane. Disappointed because is this it? Just extra seats? Not sure what I was expecting, maybe like a bar? A restaurant? The pilot coming out and showing me the cockpit?

One day I saw one of the first posters of the A380.I thought it was a joke, or something like “Singapore Airlines will fly you like this in the future”. With future meaning like future future. Future like 2100.When the A380 was launched my dad had the luck to be on the inaugural A380 Singapore to Paris flight. Not sure if actually the inaugural one, but he got champagne and there was a red carpet.I flew the A380 only once. I was again excited and disappointed. Excited because wow you could truly feel the curvature of the airplane and you could darken the windows by touching the sensor. Disappointed because I couldn’t go on the deck. This time I am sure I was expecting a restaurant as a bare minimum.

The most random airport I have been to is the Sorong Airport, in the Indonesian part of New Guinea. It’s a single hangar (or at least it was back then). You land with a propeller airplane, you walk into the hunger, take your bag, cross the 15-meter width, and get out.

The most random airplane was a Scoot 787 from Kuala Lumpur to Bali. Imagine a Ryanair kind-of-vibes airplane, but make it 8 sets per row and twice as long. Big airplanes shouldn’t be supposed to look like huge Ryanair airplanes. No screens, Ikea seats, total cognitive dissonance.

I love airports, they are a bonsai society. Business travelers, families, friends, couples. The fancy ones, the comfy ones. Those who travel a lot, those who don’t. I like having coffee and observing what’s happening around me. Hope I don’t look like a creep. Think about it: airports are on average the biggest single-closed-space you go to. It’s a different breath of air.

When you get in a car usually people don’t whisper “hope we don’t crash”, but I have always whispered “hope we don’t crash” during take-off. My fear of flying began a couple of years ago, quite much out of the blue. The only correlation I have is that in 2021 I started becoming more aware of the remote possibility that I might one day die.

Anxiety would kick in especially during take-off. At its worst, anxiety kicked in the day before and I’d remain hyper-vigilant throughout the flight. I hope everything didn’t explode from one minute to the other.

Rational thinking didn’t help at all. I knew the standard drill that it’s more likely to die in a car accident than in an airplane crash. So I’d do what any person would do. I gathered more data. My thinking was, well maybe I am not convinced in the core of my heart that planes are safe. So I’ll just study more, have more data, and finally rationally get out of this fear once and for all.

I like engineering, so for me it was simply shifting my youtube from geography and coffee workflows to aeroengineering and airport operations. I watched interviews of pilots explaining that planes can glide for up to 200 miles, I studied that airplanes need to follow a specific path so that there is always a nearby airport, watched documentaries of avoided crashes, like airplanes running out of energy, running out of fuel, losing an engine, having one pilot dying. For fuck’s sake, I also watched tons of videos about people learning how to fly and managing moments of crisis. I learned technical terms like pushback, how airplanes get virtual runway in the sky before landing through radio, how flaps should behave, why the vertical stabilizer is important and why stealth airplanes are an engineering nightmare because they miss it, how they communicate with radio towers, how they don’t crash with other airplanes midair. I watched this virgin airplane landing with one set of gears missing. I watched this other video about how wings can sustain incredible flexibility. Then I watched all crash documentaries to learn how accidents happen primarily because a series of super-rare things all happen one after the other in the most unfortunate sequence of unlikely events.

It got worse, lol.

Ironically, I fed my fear even more. Knowing now all these things, they were all things that could potentially go wrong! I started being obsessive in figuring out that everything was going well (me, as a passenger, with zero hours of flying experience).

Ok pushback initiated, the engine makes the right amount of noise, ac turned off because of take off, the pilots must be communicating with the tower control to check that no airplane is landing on our runway, flaps are in a good position, and so on.

I was thrilled to hear that a boeing lost a hidden door during take off.

The whole fear thing started to improve when I read The Happiness Trap. Besides having the most misleading title in history (it’s not a book about the trap of happiness, and definitely not a book about happiness), it has great wisdom in sharing everything you need to know about ACT (acceptance commitment therapy).

The gist of it is that when you try to fight your emotions, you can succeed in the short and long term, but they will bounce back bigger than originally possible. Imagine your average toxic relationship ending very badly, or the average high achiever succeeding in something he didn’t care of and going into universal crisis at 40 yo.

What you should do instead, is to accept that you feel what you’re feeling. It’s ok, you don’t have to fight it. It doesn’t mean you have to like it, just imagine you had a person you didn’t like in the room and he is chained to the wall. You don’t want it, and that’s fine. You don’t like it, and that’s fine. But you have to accept that he is there.

In practice, this means that when flying, I no longer tell myself “well you gotta be irrational to feel this way, did you know that cars…”. I just accept my fear and say “alright, I am feeling this fear. Yes, it’s scary. I know and I see it”.

Then you commit to it. Committing means that instead of looking away from the person, you engage. In practical terms, it means noticing how your body feels.Simple things. Is your foot getting colder? Do you feel tension in your left arm? Do you feel anxiety in your heart? Where? What shape is it? What are you afraid of? Of the plane crashing? Of the pilot dying? Of doing an emergency landing? Of not seeing your dad anymore? Are your lips dry? Or are you salivating?

You engage with it, you talk to it. It’s a painful act at first, because not only you are feeling fear, but you’re diving into it. So before it was only about crashing, but now it’s about crashing and not seeing anymore your loved ones, not following your dreams anymore, not flying Singapore Airlines anymore, not taking an out-of-measure bag in a Ryanair flight and not getting caught anymore, plus you’re now also super well aware that you have tension all over the body, you’re sweating, all of sudden it’s warmer, you notice all the weird sounds of the airplane, you feel your adrenaline spike up, it’s a hell.

But then, all of a sudden, it goes. Flight after flight, it improves. The fear gets naturally contained. The person in the room is still there, but instead of constantly talking to you he stays silent most of the time. And when he does talk, you have learned to simply observe it.

Btw, this also works for other stuff in life - I’ll write about it next time.

One thing I haven’t yet understood about airlines. Why do they keep serving Lotus Biscoff biscuits? Obviously they are kinda bad.