FEAR OF FLYING
Monday 13 June 2011
Your stomach turns over, your palms sweat, you don’t hear what anyone is saying, you are convinced you have just signed your own death warrant, and that is only when you book your airline ticket! Does that sound familiar to you? I talk of course about fear of flying, and I don’t mean Erica Jong’s famous erotic book Fear of Flying and the ‘zipless fuck’, I refer only in getting from Dublin Airport to Any Airport without having to be drugged up to the eyeballs or plastered! Having flown all over the place, never really liking it, the fear just grew until I stopped flying. I do love ferries, being able to take the car, drive around and come home with wine and other goodies in the boot. However, not flying has meant in recent years that I can’t go on that Opera weekend to Verona, or that lovely trip to Lake Garda with the girls.
There’s a touch of Fr. Ted here too! In my youth, I thought Irish planes, the St. Patrick, St. Columba or whatever, would not crash because they were Blessed! I wasn’t so sure about all those other heathen aircraft but ours were grand – until the Tusker Rock plane crash! That however is a long time ago and it has to be said we have had a great safety record. Still, I have flown from Amsterdam to London in turbulance and rattling all the way. I have vivid memories of flying through lightening and storms to Majorca, of kissing the ground when I got off. I remember four of us drinking our way through the Champagne stocks on board flight to Tenerife and getting off in a haze, taking three days to recover, and worrying about getting back.
What is it that scares us so much? Is it that we don’t trust the aircraft, the crew, or ourselves? Is it the loss of control when we put ourselves in someone else’s hands or is it just claustrophobia? As a child, we always ran to the window to look at a plane going overhead, I still do it today, I get a buzz of excitement and want to be up there……
I discovered that I am far from alone in my irrational fears. I took part recently in a Fly Fearless course run by Michael Comyn at the Dublin Airport Logistics Park and met people with all of the same obsessions. We are convinced that although thousands of planes are flying all over the place every minute of the day or night – indeed we were shown them on a live web link – ours will be the one that will crash, be hi-jacked, or whatever. What did surprise me though was that so many of our group of fourteen were what I would call young cool people.
Fiona and Hannah de Burgh Whyte are a mother and daughter who are both terrified of flying. Fiona, who is a TV producer for commercials, says that her father imbued this fear on his family. “I used to fly for work but I had to give that up, I would back out at the airport, and I passed the fear on to Hanna because she would see me anxious on the plane. She was quite good for a while at managing it but it has got really bad now and she now does what I used to do, back out at the last minute.” “Its problematic”, says Hannah aged 19. “I am on the Irish Cricket Team and a lot of cricket is played far away in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh so I have to get over this quickly. The World Cup qualifiers are in Bangledesh in November so I am hoping to get picked for that and you can’t get a boat back from Bangledesh!” she laughed. “I went to England with the squad last year and I flew out fine but after the matches when we went to fly back I got as far as the door of the plane, with my bag already on board, and I backed out and I had to make my Captain get trains and ferries home!” Fiona says she has given herself a two hour radius for flying. “I can manage myself for two hours and get to nice places in Europe in two hours. However, I am doing this course now because I turned up at the Airport recently, it was a work related flight, and I arrived at the Airport at 5 a.m. knowing I wasn’t going to get on the plane. I handed over my work files to my colleagues, went home to bed and cried my eyes out for 24 hours. I had to do something about this.”
Rob Walsh from Bray is a 29 year old Audio Visual Technician and keen Rugby fan. “I walked off a flight to London. Ten minutes later, when they calmed me down, I got back on. I was sitting beside Diarmiud Gavin and he was really nice, talking to me as we took off, and the stewardesses were fantastic.” Rob too thinks he picked up his nervousness from his mum who he says is also nervous on flights. “I go to the Six Nations every year on the Boat via Holyhead – I love the boats – I can’t swim – but I love boats! The fear is irrational, but it has been really good having all the noises on an aircraft being explained to you, it has really helped.” Audrey Flynn from Newbridge is 25 and flew a lot as a child but her last trip was in 2004 when she was 18. “I had a bad experience on the way home with severe turbulance and I just wanted to get off the plane and it put me off.” Susan Lynn aged 27 had come down from Derry to do the course and she going to try and fly to England for a weekend before embarking hopefully to Lanzarote in the summer.
All of these people had a barrel load of questions for Michael Comyn of Fly Fearless – “what’s this noise, what’s that noise, what sort of danger are birds, what about ashcloud, how does the door close, what heighth do you fly at, is turbulance dangerous, what about lightening, how are the crew trained?” He answered them all in great detail explaining the brain’s reaction to certain things, all of the planning and checking that goes on before any flight departs – very impressive. “That pretty hostess is not just nodding hello, hello, hello, they are highly trained, she is assessing each passenger as they board – the fit ones, the not so fit ones, the ones who don’t eat or drink at all on a long flight (apparently they might be carrying drugs in their body!).” Technology has improved so much. Planes nowadays also have an instrument called a TCAS - a secondary Collision Avoidance Systen, which they didn’t have ten years ago which shows aircraft around you and if they deviate from their path. “Suck, squeeze, bang, blow, is how a jet engine works,” Michael explained. “A good one for the pub” he quipped “Jet engines suck in air, squeeze it, ignite it and it blows it out the back.” “Ego driven risk takers are not taken nowadays to train as pilots – they are all as safe as Bank Managers! Pilots are regulated very strictly and allowed 900 hours maximum annual flying time.” He covered every topic with advice on relaxation and anxiety management techniques.
Michael Comyn was the youngest ever pilot at 16 years old to get a pilots licence in 1976. He was intending to become a fulltime pilot but ended up going to the U.S. where he studied Management and Psychology – keeping his interest in aviation and getting a Commercial Helicopter Licence in U.S. Management Training is his field dealing with many multinational companies in the area of stress management and leadership. However, “the bottom fell out of that market in 2008 and over 3 days I lost €47,000 worth of bookings from Banks, Insurance Companies, and so on. There were no more leadership training programmes and I was sitting at home totally miserable, and then thought what am I going to do with this – flying – phobias – my qualifications - fear of flying courses. Two years later we are here, 500 people plus per year doing the course, and I absolutely love it. We are very honest when we say there is about a 92% success in people we get flying and there will always be those we can’t.” Michael says that the typical profile of those who won’t fly has been that the person has other general life anxieties. “They may have a bucket load of things that upset them but also you may find there may be a secondary gain in staying as they are. For example, they already wield a huge control by deciding where people go on holidays and everybody moderates their behaviour around them. It’s a small example, and not everyone, but they are stuck in it cos it suits them. The rest of the time we have been able to get people moving.” Michael also runs MCC courses - multi crew cordinating programmes teaching pilots who have been working on their own how to work with other people. The seminar ran from 10 am – 4 pm and included a light lunch and coffee. You can also take part in a Simulator Session at the end of day and ‘fly all over the place’ without ever leaving the ground but it gives you the feel again of sounds and sensations and a “rejected landing”. The next step then is to take part in an accompanied flight to Sligo a few weeks later. They very wisely don’t take you on an actual accompanied flight on the day of the seminar so that you are relaxed on the day. They also provide an ‘aftercare’ service so you can call them before you go on that holiday or business trip buoyed up with a little pep talk and reassurance from Michael.
So, suck, squeeze, ignite, blow, Seville here I come!
Tel: 1890 200047 or 086 256-1729
THIS IS THE UNEDITED VERSION OF THE ARTICLE WHICH FIRST APPEARED IN THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT ON JUNE 12, 2011.