by Patrick Smith, Salon
“As we cruised toward Portland, a thousand or so feet above the cottony peaks, the slamming came on with a vengeance. We requested a climb, but not soon enough. When the worst of the pummeling hit, it was like being stuck in an upside-down avalanche. Even with a shoulder harness pulled snug, I remember holding up one hand to brace myself, afraid my head might hit the ceiling.”
Turbulence: spiller of coffee, jostler of luggage, filler of barf bags, rattler of nerves. But is it a crasher of planes?
Judging by the reactions of many airline passengers, one would assume so. I’d been a commercial pilot for the better part of 10 years, a job that requires its share of impromptu coaching sessions with white-knucklers, and figured I had a pretty good grasp of the fearful flier mind-set. I didn’t. Not until I began writing for this magazine, and fielding questions from the public, did I realize how upsetting, if you’ll grant the pun, turbulence is for tens of thousands of travelers.
“Turbulence is the issue,” says Tom Bunn, a retired captain and licensed therapist. Bunn founded the nation’s most popular fearful flier program, SOAR. “It is far and away the No. 1 concern among my clients.”
Intuitively this makes sense. Everybody who steps on a plane is on some level uneasy, and there’s not a more poignant reminder of flying’s innate precariousness, and all its potential complications, than a good walloping at 37,000 feet. It’s easy to picture the airplane as a helpless dinghy caught unawares in a stormy sea. Boats are occasionally swamped, capsized or dashed into reefs by swells, are they not? Everything about it seems dangerous.
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“As we cruised toward Portland, a thousand or so feet above the cottony peaks, the slamming came on with a vengeance. We requested a climb, but not soon enough. When the worst of the pummeling hit, it was like being stuck in an upside-down avalanche. Even with a shoulder harness pulled snug, I remember holding up one hand to brace myself, afraid my head might hit the ceiling.”
Turbulence: spiller of coffee, jostler of luggage, filler of barf bags, rattler of nerves. But is it a crasher of planes?
Judging by the reactions of many airline passengers, one would assume so. I’d been a commercial pilot for the better part of 10 years, a job that requires its share of impromptu coaching sessions with white-knucklers, and figured I had a pretty good grasp of the fearful flier mind-set. I didn’t. Not until I began writing for this magazine, and fielding questions from the public, did I realize how upsetting, if you’ll grant the pun, turbulence is for tens of thousands of travelers. “Turbulence is the issue,” says Tom Bunn, a retired captain and licensed therapist. Bunn founded the nation’s most popular fearful flier program, SOAR. “It is far and away the No. 1 concern among my clients.”
Intuitively this makes sense. Everybody who steps on a plane is on some level uneasy, and there’s not a more poignant reminder of flying’s innate precariousness, and all its potential complications, than a good walloping at 37,000 feet. It’s easy to picture the airplane as a helpless dinghy caught unawares in a stormy sea. Boats are occasionally swamped, capsized or dashed into reefs by swells, are they not? Everything about it seems dangerous.
Read more:
