Winging It

On the window of the Bradford Regional Airport in Pennsylvania, someone has written in orange marker: Learn to fly! 90 min $150.00. I try not to read into things like this. I have a case of what cognitive behavioral therapists call magical thinking: an unquenchable form of anxiety that sees in everything a portent of doom. I’ve been working on this, so I remind myself: Just because I find something hokey does not mean my plane will crash. Just because a flight instructor’s name and phone number are scribbled in marker on the wall does not mean he is unqualified. Just because the airport uses what looks like clip art in the ads it posts to Facebook does not mean its flights are unsafe. When the woman checking all four passengers in for the flight to Pittsburgh asks my bag’s weight and then my weight, I remind myself what I’ve learned: Fear is False Evidence Appearing Real.

I could—maybe should—have driven. But a ticket was only forty dollars, and though my anxiety finds that distressingly cheap, that made it the ideal leg for what some of my comrades in the FearlessFlight Birds of a Feather Facebook support group call a “practice flight”—a lower-stakes opportunity to exercise our aerophobia coping techniques. Determined to finally get a grip on my anxiety, I purchased a ticket as well as Captain Ron’s FearlessFlight® Kit, which included a recorded meditation, an instructional packet including plane safety statistics, and a booklet of testimonials from people who’d successfully conquered their fears. It was corny, sure, but still I felt hopeful.

Our pilots walked with us on the tarmac to our plane, a single-propeller Cessna 208 Caravan with nine seats, then opened the side door and checked our names off a clipboard, telling us where to sit based on how much we’d told the lady at the front counter we weighed. The woman sitting behind me said: “We flew up here Friday in a storm. Don’t ask me how I feel about it.” I didn’t. From my seat, I could see out the front of the plane, and I clutched my armrest as the Earth tilted away.

We launched out over the Allegheny National Forest, which some friends had assured me was so beautiful it would ease my fears. I learned, instead, that I’m capable of misery even in the face of great beauty, and as I stared out five hundred thousand acres of untouched woodland I listened, on loop, to my FearlessFlight Harmonizer, a thirty-two-minute track underlaid with hypnotherapy techniques such as “multi-evocation” and “bilateral brain stimulation” designed to pull my attention away from panic. “You’re soaring,” said the voices into my noise-cancelling headphones. “You can see so well from this altitude.”

Aerophobia is having a moment. In January, an American Airlines jet crashed into a U.S. Army helicopter in Washington, D.C., killing sixty-seven; less than three months later, a helicopter crashed into New York City’s Hudson River, killing six; for months this spring, cancellations, delays, and disruptions plagued New Jersey’s Newark airport; the shortage of air traffic controllers only continues to get worse; and every single headline involving the beleaguered Boeing seems to indicate that something is seriously wrong with the world of commercial aviation.

But I’ve been panicky and nauseous on planes my whole life, and plenty of others have too. Today, approximately twenty-five million Americans are aerophobic. There is a vast online ecosystem for nervous flyers, including r/fearofflying, where people ask other Redditors to “watch” their flight using tracking apps. There’s Dial A Pilot, which offers customers the chance to call pilots for reassurance before boarding a flight. There’s Lovefly, a podcast interviewing people who’ve overcome their aerophobia. And there’s the famous SOAR method, which is both a self-help book and course led by a pilot and a licensed therapist.

I’ve dabbled in all of these. But it was Captain Ron, a Vietnam War vet with a master’s degree in counseling, who truly understood me. Captain Ron’s FearlessFlight® is the only one of these methods I’ve ever stuck with because, well, I like the guy. In our first meeting, a fifteen-minute free coaching session that sprawled well past the time allotted, I asked: How can I have flown so much, and still be so scared? Why am I getting worse, not better, with time? He nodded sagely and explained to me that this is common among people with severe flight anxiety, that our anxiety has created bad mental pathways, and with each bad flight, we reinforce them, making them worse.

This sounds right, but I think there’s more to it. In addition to having a panic disorder, I’ve grown increasingly aware of the spit and tape holding society together. Over the course of a deadly pandemic, numerous mass shootings, systemic police brutality and more, the government appeared unable or unwilling to prevent citizen deaths at all; each day seemed to bring a new report about how defunded federal programs and aging infrastructure pose a threat to American lives. At worst, federal agencies designed to protect us appear callous to suffering, and at best, they are feckless and impotent. I have come to understand that the “experts” our society leans on are regular, fallible people just like me. Everyone realizes this in time; my realization just occurred at a time when fascism also dug in its heels. It strikes me now that, as so many Americans are losing faith in experts and institutions, I’m undergoing therapy to preserve mine.

Fiery plane crashes, meanwhile, have moved beyond the headlines into the broader culture. Earlier this year Kate Folk published her debut novel Sky Daddy, about a woman sexually attracted to airplanes. Or, more specifically, plane crashes—in the protagonist Linda’s words: “I believed this was my destiny: for a plane to recognize me as his soulmate mid-flight and, overcome with passion, relinquish his grip on the sky, hurtling us to earth in a carnage that would meld our souls for eternity.” The book has been described by reviewers as “zany,” “strange” and “deeply weird,” but from my perspective, Linda’s pathology makes a kind of sense. For one, she’s baffled by others’ nonchalance at hurtling through the sky in a metal tube: “I’d never understood the complacency with which ordinary people regarded the miracle of flight.” And she understands, as I do, that boarding a plane is an act of surrender. Linda just finds sexy what I find scary.

That undercurrent of fear is what lends Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal its edge. In season two, released this spring, the comedian tackles aviation safety through elaborate, staged scenarios with real pilots, zeroing in on communication issues between captains and first officers as an under-addressed cause of crashes. In one episode, he asks a commercial pilot to have a hard conversation with his girlfriend while in a flight simulator; in another, he asks an actor to coax a shy pilot into kissing her. Throughout the season, Fielder puts on a fake American Idol-style singing competition with real contestants as a way for real pilots serving as judges to practice delivering harsh truths. Fielder’s goofy scenarios—including one in which he dresses up as a baby Sully Sullenberger (of “Miracle on the Hudson” fame) and suckles the teat of a massive puppet—are made goofier by the fact that they’re ultimately about plane crashes. This also gives the show its dramatic tension. When, in the final episode, Fielder reveals that he’s been studying for years to acquire a license to pilot a 737 and then takes off in a rented one from San Bernardino with 150 passengers, it’s not a punchline; it’s high drama.

The second season of The Rehearsal and Sky Daddy both debuted roughly three months after the American Airlines crash over the Potomac, and four months after a plane crashed in South Korea, killing 179. They debuted two months after a landing gear failure caused a flight to flip upside down on the runway in Toronto, and a little more than a year after a panel blew off an Alaska Airlines plane mid-flight and a Boeing whistleblower was found dead. They debuted almost two years after experts appointed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) called for urgent action after a string of close calls but just weeks before United Airlines cut thirty-five daily flights at Newark due to an understaffing of air traffic controllers. This flurry of headlines gives the impression that all of this is a recent phenomenon, but the groundwork for the current crisis was laid decades ago. Ronald Reagan paved the way when he fired more than eleven thousand striking air traffic controllers and decertified their union in 1981, causing a mad rush to rehire and a wave of retirements years later. Today, more than 90 percent of U.S. airport towers are understaffed, and working conditions were so bad during a ninety-second outage at Newark in April that some controllers took “trauma leave” afterward.

Flying is still very, very safe—but public responses to air incidents belie our anxieties, which appear to have increased in recent years as Americans come to question long-standing institutions we’d previously taken for granted. Alaska Airlines got the Saturday Night Live treatment, and John Oliver pounded his fists on TV last month in a screed about the air traffic controller shortage: “We need to do everything we can to ramp up hiring of air traffic controllers,” he boomed, “because it is critically important work, and it needs to be properly valued.” The Rehearsal’s extratextual moments include Nathan Fielder going viral for calling the FAA “dumb” on CNN. (The FAA publicly rejected The Rehearsal’s claim that pilot-first captain communication training is insufficient, even though former National Transportation Safety Board member John Goglia backed Fielder up.)

Our feelings aside, we’re fine—statistically speaking. That’s why fear of flying courses are full of reassuring facts: The chance of you being killed on a commercial flight is one in twenty-three million, which is lower than the chance of a child growing up to become the American president. According to the FearlessFlight Kit, you’re nearly two thousand times more likely to die in a car crash, meaning you’re far more likely to die on your way to the airport than you are in the air. And though recent events are damning, the arc of history has moved in safety’s favor, with commercial air travel getting about twice as safe each decade since the 1960s, according to an MIT study published last year. One piece of emotional reassurance that gets shared a lot in fear of flying circles is a video of Boeing’s triumphant 1995 wing pressure test, which still gets shown in engineering courses today. In the clip, the load-bearing capacity of a 777 wing is tested using a massive contraption that pulls on the wings until they snap at 154 percent of the capacity they were designed to withstand.

But it takes more than stats to release someone from phobia’s grip, and I can’t help but relate to Sky Daddy’s Linda when she says, “I believed my connection to planes transcended raw statistics.” A fear of flying course, then, aims to reconcile the quantifiable, provable safety record with nervous fliers’ unquantifiable fears, which are natural responses to everything from news headlines to the sense that being forty thousand feet above the Earth just doesn’t feel quite right. One way to achieve this is to lean into positive emotions surrounding flights and flight safety, which the FearlessFlight Harmonizer does by ending on a poem by John Gillespie Magee Jr. about soaring through the sky: “Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth / And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings.”

For me, Sky Daddy constitutes a fantasy in itself. I lost myself in visions of me on a plane, not aroused but flipping the coin to the other side of anxiety: excitement. Fear of flying therapy is about reframing the flight experience; if my mind’s eye squints, I can almost interpret my sweating palms and pounding heartbeat as a kind of buzz. But this requires repeated, strenuous effort, and the result is a mental exhaustion that makes the worst-case scenario appealing: succumbing to my fears and never flying again.

I imagine this as analogous to what many Americans, aerophobic or not, are feeling. It’s simply easier to buy into the assumptions underlying our fears—to let our discomfort with needles curdle into “Make America Healthy Again,” to let our fear of change become racist xenophobia. There’s even a payoff, now that conspiratorial politics rule Washington under Trump 2.0: people have succeeded in the reframing I’ve been working so hard to achieve. His followers have converted their anxiety into excitement. The rest of us, meanwhile, watch in terror as Trump shutters government watchdogs, unwinds regulation, and cuts spending to essential services.

If there’s relief in giving in to our fears, there’s also pleasure in looking for false evidence. Conspiracy theories reward believers’ ability to suss out clues that, when pieced together, create a counternarrative to predominant thinking. I’ve been thinking about this as my brain collects clues for its own narrative about the dangerousness of air travel while struggling to discern which evidence is false, and which is real. My comrades online have the same struggle. Last month, I tuned into Captain Ron’s weekly YouTube livestream, and a commenter asked if the military had done anything to “stop the close calls.” Questions like this are all over the fearful flyer internet lately—recently, a Redditor confessed to having rebooked all their itineraries to avoid Boeing planes.

Those in the business of reassurance have a lot of great things to say to moments like this: that the news doesn’t report on the thousands of flights that land safely every day, for instance, and that, right now, hundreds of thousands of people are in the air and are just fine. My flight landed in Pittsburgh without incident, of course, and my pilots went on to fly it back and forth with the same routine nonchalance of anyone with a day job. I even noticed my anxiety levels had diminished the following week, when I took a short flight on a larger, more conventional commercial aircraft to New York—and felt comparatively sane.

Three days after I returned from that trip, though, I logged onto Facebook and noticed a rare tone of conflict in the normally supportive Birds of a Feather group, with some posters scolding others for wantonly posting triggers. I learned through scrolling that more than two hundred people were confirmed dead in an Air India crash on June 12, India’s deadliest aviation incident in decades. Some members of the group reassured others that flying is still the safest form of travel. But one commenter shared the viewpoint that all of us, sometimes, are tempted to give into: “This is why I don’t fly.”