Flying solo

When you read this I will be in a foreign country – I’m travelling to the east and I will be jet lagged. The first time I experienced jet lag it felt as if my body had been taken over by aliens (I’m not talking about people watch those wretched Sacha Baron Cohen movies – those people are totally weird) and they had no plans to surrender it any time soon.

Sleeplessness and falling asleep at totally inappropriate times (head in the soup stuff) aside, I also felt depressed and anxious and unable to string a coherent sentence together. And if you happen to be staying in more than one place during your trip, waking up in your fourth strange room in as many days can invoke a panic attack in the most level headed of us.

I have a confession – flying freaks me out. And for those of us afflicted with this fear, recent times are not reassuring. There seems to be a catastrophic event almost every second week, each one more bizarre than the last. A few days ago a helicopter and plane collided over the Hudson in New York, a Thai plane crash taxied into an old control tower (in an example of how not to parallel park a jet aeroplane) and not so long ago an Air France plane simply dropped out of the sky into the sea. A less serious event was the sudden drop of a US bound plane, leaving many people with more than egg on their faces – hand luggage, galley equipment and perhaps the odd life jacket were freed from their usual spots.

Of course I read all the disaster stories and watch air crash investigation shows on satellite television with the kind of attention to detail usually shown by, well, air crash investigators. I think it’s partly an overdeveloped sense of empathy that’s to blame (just what must it feel like when you’re falling out of the sky?) but I think it’s also about trying to gain some kind of control. Perhaps I’ll learn just what position you can survive a catastrophic accident in (middle seat over the wings perhaps?) or glean how to fly a Boeing (screaming hysterically?) when the pilot’s had a heart attack.

Did you know that someone took the time to compile a list of the top ten sole survivors of unsurvivable plan crashes? Apart from the miracle of young Bahia Bakari who survived the recent Air Yemenia crash off the Comoros Islands (I can drive myself mad wondering what went through her mind for over 13 hours as she floated in the sea in the dark), one story totally astounds and horrifies me at the same time. Vesna Vulović survived the terrorist explosion that blew up the plane she was “chicken or beef”ing in at 33 000 feet. She was found alive and quite badly hurt with, among other things, a serving trolley pinned up against her (clearly she took her job too seriously to let go). On the upside, apart from surviving against impossible odds, Vesna also holds the Guinness World Record for the highest fall survived without a parachute. I am not kidding. And it took all of three minutes from start to finish.

But Slovak peacekeeper Martin Farkaš (another east European, damn there must be a lucky gene) must also be thrilled, and a little bemused, to have survived his military plane’s crash in Hungary – he was found in the largely undamaged toilet. That’s one bathroom explosion he couldn’t have expected. Jokes aside, surviving this kind of event must be truly strange, not to mention life altering. One child survivor of a US crash which killed 154 people, including her parents and brother, subsequently earned a psychology degree and still writes to families of some of the other deceased (hmm, survivor guilt perhaps).

So I actually intended to make this blog about what you read to deal with your fear of flying, but realise that I needed to let you know just how perverse my curiosity about flying and dying is. So, see you soon, I’ll let you know how I coped (or didn’t).