Flying
‘In the meantime, sit back, relax and enjoy the flight.’
For years, those words were the alarm clock signalling the beginning of my working weeks. Words, intended to calm, which invariably triggered latent fear.
In the teeth of all the information, with which I’m familiar, around the robustness of planes, I am frightened by turbulence. It is as though the lurching, vibrating sensation engenders a visceral reaction which bypasses or neutralises reason, perhaps in the same way as the fakery of religion penetrates otherwise rational minds.
Travel was essential. Some weeks, I spent longer travelling than in the office. No matter, travelling was work, increasingly so after the advent of mobile phones and as laptops were untethered from graunchy dial up and replaced by ubiquitous wi-fi. Work outbound, sleep inbound. That was the edict for transatlantic flights. On short haul, the assumption was you worked both ways, or at least until the abundant free alcohol took effect.
So paralysis by fear of flying was as impractical as demanding your own office on the grounds that open plan triggered agoraphobia. I took a flying desensitisation course being offered free by the local newspaper in return for the right to plaster the rag with images of cowering passengers vomiting on the tarmac or being reluctantly hauled into the maw of a plane.
The morning session was devoted to lectures from a flying instructor standing next to a crisply attired airline captain.
‘How do planes actually fly,’ we asked?
‘Because the air passing over the curved upper surface of the wing has to travel faster than the air traversing the flat, lower surface, thus creating a vacuum and producing lift.’
A simple, neat and convincing answer. Unfortunately, it’s wrong, or at least a gross over-simplification. (In the award-winning radio comedy, Cabin Pressure, there is an embarrassed silence when this theory is challenged innocently by the observation that planes can fly upside down.)
After lunch, we were herded into the plane, a beefy Boeing 757. At the top of the steps, one victim, a mousy woman who had sat with a glazed expression at the back of the class, refused and tuned tail, unabashed by the ignominy matched only, to my mind, by making one’s way back down the ladder from the platform of a bungee jump and the main reason it’s not on my bucket list. Another got as far as her seat before fleeing through the still open door. The rest of us clipped in dutifully, well-spaced around the mainly empty plane, and listened to the reassuring commentary (‘hear that click, it’s the undercarriage retracting’) from the crisp captain flying us from Birmingham to Glasgow.
It was early spring, and the air was as calm as the atmospheric equivalent of a millpond. My son had been born the previous week and it was without the blessing of his mother (whose only challenge on her ten-mile drive to work was the occasional traffic jam) that I was indulging in this trip. There was no turbulence, so that while others endured the entire trip remoulding their arm rests with whitened knuckles or eyes squeezed shut in an ecstasy of terror, I sat demurely at peace as we made our way across northern England, circled Glasgow airport and returned with a feather light landing to the Midlands.
The only value I derived from the event, other than avoiding several nappy changes, was the instructor’s encouragement to request a visit to the cockpit on future flights if we felt that would calm our nerves. On many occasions since then – we are talking 1990’s, oh, halcyon, innocent days! – I would signal to a passing flight attendant, reach up to them conspiratorially and make my request, deploying the open sesame phrase, nervous flier. Always, it was granted. The theory was that seeing confident, self-assured people crisply in charge of the plane would dissipate the anxiety. In my case, it was the boyish fascination with the switches, knobs, screens and lights, such as lads of the early twentieth century might have experienced on the footplate of a locomotive, which provided such a distraction that fear lost its grip.
Late in my flying career, I was approached by a confidential flight attendant during a trip to Stockholm.
‘Mr Thompson?’ he inquired.
I froze. Why was I the passenger he had picked to inform that we had run out of fuel/a wing had dropped off/the pilot had had a heart attack and I had been selected to land the plane?
‘Mr Thompson, I have just had a message from the Executive Club. At the end of this flight, you will have flown half a million miles with British Airways.’
He looked as chuffed as if he had personally booked and paid for all my tickets.
‘We would like to offer you a glass of champagne to mark the occasion.’
I nodded my acceptance. In traditional BA style, it was lukewarm.
Since ending my working life, I have had no need to fly and have smugly occupied the moral high ground, deprecating aviation for its contribution to global heating. A stance which has been annoyingly devalued by the forced grounding of everyone else by coronavirus. I see pictures of aircraft, tessellated nose to tail, in the Mojave desert, nicknamed the boneyard, and rejoice.
But Google and Apple, who know me better than I do myself, mine deep into my history to excavate secrets and release demons. Periodically, interspersed between videos demonstrating how to repair bicycle punctures and showcasing the latest innovations in electric cars, I am offered footage of the pilot’s eye view of a 747 departing JFK, or a carefully coiffed senior first officer tackling a cross-wind landing in Dublin. I hesitate only for a moment. I pour a glass of wine and lower the lights. Now I’m sitting at the pilot’s shoulder watching the runway unfold. A robotic voice announces V1: the point of no return. Finally, I am able to sit back, relax and enjoy the flight.
