Stephen Phelan

I AM afraid. Merely admitting this does not make me feel any better about flying, and yet I often say it aloud to the person sitting next to me on a plane during take-off or turbulence, those two fixtures of aviation which always make my face and palms ice over with doom-sweat. If that person is my girlfriend, I can put my head in her lap. If it’s just a friend, I will demand that they stop reading, sleeping, or selfishly amusing themselves with in-flight entertainment, and distract me immediately.

If it’s a stranger, I might politely request that they just talk to me for a while, although I did once suggest to a fellow passenger that we hold hands, when our aircraft was chewed and swallowed by a vast and evil black cloud above the Rocky Mountains. He seemed like a good sport, but he thought I was joking. On another occasion, the woman beside me beat me to it, beginning to cry with fear before we had even pushed back from the gate. Wow, I thought. Get a hold of yourself. “The world is divided into two kinds of people,” writes Layne Ridley in her book White Knuckles: Getting Over A Fear Of Flying.

“Intelligent, sensitive people with some breadth of imagination, and people who aren’t the least bit afraid of flying.” In my opinion, this statement is basically accurate, and official estimates more or less support Ridley’s ratio of nervous to fearless fliers. At the World Fear Of Flying Conference in Montreal last year, the International Civil Aviation Organisation recognised that up to 40% of air travellers now register on a sliding scale from mild anxiety to primal terror. Personally, I can oscillate wildly between the two within a single flight, averaging out somewhere in the middle.

Captain Keith Godfrey, a former airline pilot who has dedicated himself to helping people like me, says this is very common. “Maybe there’s an underlying fear going on,” suggests Godfrey, “which you’re projecting on to flying. Maybe you had a bad experience on a previous flight. Perhaps you don’t like handing control of your life to a stranger. Or a life-changing event – love, parenthood, loss – could have made you feel more vulnerable ” Since retiring from British Airways nearly a decade ago, Godfrey has published a book, constructed a website, released a set of audio discs and most recently a DVD – all under the banner and promise of Flying Without Fear. Virgin Atlantic, incidentally, runs an unrelated anti-anxiety programme with the same name, and Godfrey’s old employers at BA offer similar courses to their most reluctant customers.

Even so, he argues that many airlines and airports still “refuse to acknowledge the extent of fear among the travelling public”. “It’s a scandal,” he says. “It’s time something was done about it.” His new DVD makes a modest but instructive contribution, documenting a seminar in which a room full of nervous fliers tell Godfrey exactly what they are afraid of. “The lack of control,” says a middle-aged man called Tony. “Turbulence,” says a woman called Lyn, and everyone agrees.

Others volunteer stories of panic attacks and aborted flights, of returning from holidays overland at great expense, of guilt about their children inheriting this affliction, and never seeing the world as a result. Godfrey, in turn, addresses their various concerns with a technical, methodical, accessible acumen. Some good questions are raised. Do budget airlines invest sufficiently in training and maintenance? Is the air traffic system becoming jammed by overuse? How quickly, and aggressively, can the weather turn against a cruising plane?

Specifics aside, and his reservations about the commercial aspects of the industry notwithstanding, Godfrey’s answers tend toward an absolute faith in the physics of flight and the professionals at work in civil aviation. His operative word is “normal”. “Flying is not a miracle,” he tells the group. “It’s not even a mystery. It’s a normal thing try to normalise it.” They seem to take some comfort from his assurance that their fear of flying is normal too. But when Godfrey finally takes them all up in a small jet, and the initial gasps and sobs quieten into a relieved, even reverent admiration of the view, that word becomes inadequate. “This is phenomenal,” says Tony. “I feel so good now,” says a goth called Fay, when she eventually opens her eyes. I have felt the same way on certain flights in the past, staring out of the windows at white clouds and blue sky and gold sunbeams for hours at a time, as rapt as a religious painter, and almost as convinced that the heavens are benevolent. Sooner or later, though, a lash or two of turbulence will persuade me that, if anything, I believe the opposite. According to Godfrey, such irrationalism is also perfectly ordinary.

“You’re only human, aren’t you?” he asks, with sympathy, when I contact him with follow-up questions of my own. I want to know how these moments of peace are even possible on an aircraft, while I am waiting for the roof, walls, or floor to rip away, pitching me outside, seat and all, face first and screaming, as has happened many times in my dreams. Godfrey reassures me that planes don’t defy gravity, “they use it”. “The chances are you will get over your fear,” he says. “Take small steps and be reasonable in your objectives.” He also tells me that I am welcome to phone him for pep talks, even in the middle of the night – an offer he extends to all his nervous fliers. “We don’t get the publicity that bloody Virgin or British Airways get, but we sure beat them hollow when it comes to the personal touch.” I do not doubt this, but I don’t think he can help me.

Godfrey is on to something when he talks about the core tension of air travel in evolutionary terms. For most of human history, we have been conditioned to consider the sky a source of both wonder and danger. Boarding a passenger plane is just as likely to trigger one ancestral memory as the other, but our instinctive “fight or flight” response is precluded when the cabin doors are locked.

Godfrey loses me, however, with his empirical certainty that knowledge must prevail. “Feelings are misleading,” he says. “Don’t trust them. Encourage yourself with facts.” I have tried this. My dread has in fact made me borderline obsessive on the subject of aeronautics. There is not much that even a pilot can tell me about compressor stalls, wingtip vortices, adverse yaw, or bleed air. I get my perspective on plane crashes not from the “scaremongering” media that Godfrey dismisses with genuine contempt – I’ve seen enough news coverage of aviation accidents to agree that they are carelessly reported – but from such reliable sources as the US National Transportation Safety Board website, on which all available data is gathered into rigorously objective narratives of pilot error, mechanical failure, procedural breakdown, and purest entropy. It’s possible that I now know too much, as I am often told by the same friends who are supposed to be distracting me in mid-air, and that all this information only makes things worse.

They say the same about the quantities of gin and diazepam that I consume on almost every flight, which can make me forget everything – name, nationality, destination – but not my fear. I don’t need to be reminded that I’m not alone in that fear, because it does me no good. I still feel as lonely inside a plane as a plane looks inside the sky. And here I allude to the title of a book by journalist and pilot William Langewiesche – Inside The Sky: A Meditation On Flight – because it contains a precise diagnosis of this feeling. Recounting his early career in a small private charter service, Langewiesche recalls one particular passenger “who during a smooth flight at 15,000 feet suspected that perhaps he had died and gone not to heaven but to a strange and suspended place like a purgatory. He meant this quite literally. The softness of flight had combined with the visible abandonment of the streets below to give him the feeling of death.”

Purgatory is exactly right. If flying truly seemed like hell to me, as it does to some, then I probably couldn’t do it at all. But being able to see the world the way that God might – surveying the geometry of the Earth from such an abstracted height that regular human structures appear to complement irregular natural shapes – does not make it paradise. Another quote, from a short story by Saul Bellow, phrases this more poetically: “Above the marvellous bridges, over clouds, sailing in the atmosphere, you know better than ever that you are no angel.”

Validating as these words may be, it seems that reading will never cure me, because books have to do with the conscious mind. The unconscious, says life coach Lorna Hutcheon, is where people decide what they are scared of. Over coffee in Glasgow, Hutcheon tells me she can “rewire” her clients to help rid them of their phobias, bad habits, back pains and heartaches. “Your mind is like a field,” she explains. “You walk a certain path through it. I create an alternative path, and the old one becomes overgrown.” Her technique involves Neuro-Linguistic Programming, which sounds like a product of experiments on captive soldiers in North Korea, but was actually developed by US psychologist Richard Bandler as a new form of language-based counselling in the 1970s, although this doesn’t make it that much more appealing to me. Its best-known advocates in the UK are television mind-benders Derren Brown and Paul McKenna.

Hutcheon studied under Bandler himself before founding her own coaching service. She calls it Wooha, and sells it to me as nothing more sinister or complicated than talking and listening. She is nice, and absolutely earnest in wanting to help, and very quick to pick up on my reluctance to let her. “Are you sure you want to give up your fear of flying?” she asks.

As it turns out, this is not at all a daft question. When I meet Hutcheon again for a two-hour therapeutic session in a rented treatment room, she enquires at length into “how” – as opposed to “why” – the fear manifests itself. How do I behave in airports and on planes? What am I doing and thinking, especially during take-off and turbulence? What would happen if I did and thought different things? Some of my replies surprise me, but not Hutcheon, confirming as they do her suspicion that at some point, on some level, for some reason, I chose this attitude to flying, and am now in some way defined by it. I confess that I resent untroubled passengers because they do not realise or appreciate that my vigilance, my heightened awareness, is essential to the safety of the aircraft. Perversely, I am also bored by people who are bored by flying, and I’m not sure I want to be one of them. Hutcheon is not trying to make me like that – the “intention”, as she repeatedly puts it, is to turn me into someone who finds air travel not just comfortable, but enjoyable.

The challenge, for both of us, is that neither do I want to see myself as so weak-minded that I can simply be talked into changing my character. Okay then, she says, speaking directly to my unconscious, how would you prefer to feel on planes? “Contented,” I venture, with my eyes closed at her request. “Grateful.” (My unconscious is apparently alert to the fact that not everyone has the time, money, or inclination to fly as far and as frequently as I have, though I sense it has yet to process the environmental impact of this.) For each word I come out with, Hutcheon invites me to create a mental picture – an “anchor” – which will ground me even at cruise altitude. It’s a weird experience, calling up various corresponding memories which Hutcheon then activates by putting her hand on my shoulder, and this makes me think that maybe it works.

Unfortunately, and inevitably, there is only one way to find out. A good friend of mine happens to be an airline pilot, and he happens to have access to a small plane. Bruce Cleghorn, whom I have always known by his nickname, Fluff, has claimed for years that he could fix me just by taking me up with him. I have always resisted, out of worry that he might fly like he drives – which is to say, like he’s trying to outrun police helicopters. (Indeed, Fluff is prejudiced against helicopters, and refers to them as “hovering death machines”.) On a clear day during a spell of high pressure – dry air, no wind, optimum flying conditions – he finally gets his chance to show me how much he loves his job, and how well he does it. His co-pilot will be Ian Kerr, co-owner of the aircraft, a gleaming white Cirrus SR 20. And my fellow passenger is Hobbes the dog, a Jack Russell terrier who has taken to flight with the same obliviousness that I sometimes envy in small children, and wears mutt muffs to protect his ears from the engine noise. We take off from the Scottish Aero Club at Perth Airport, then immediately circle to land, lifting away again as soon as we make contact with the runway. This manoeuvre, performed over and over by pilots in training, is known as a “touch and go”. Fluff goes around twice, supposedly for my benefit, but more likely to show off, then climbs into bright sunshine. The entire country fills the windows. Loch Tay on the left, Glen Coe dead ahead, Ben Nevis on the horizon.

“It’s so still today,” says Fluff, through his headset. “What a view, boys, eh?” responds Kerr. I can see what they mean, but I don’t quite feel it. To be honest, I feel a bit sick. We are flying so much lower than a commercial jet that the land seems that much closer, kinder, more tactile. But a small propeller plane also makes flight a more physical process, and Fluff’s banking at 50 degrees creates enough G-force to make my brain and my stomach swap places. On balance, however, nausea beats dread. When Kerr clambers into the back seat, and I take his place in the front, I am less afraid than I have ever been in the sky. At 5000 feet, on a north-east bearing, directly above Rannoch Moor, Fluff gives me control of the plane. The Earth stands still for as long as it takes me to turn through 360 degrees. And for that long at least, I feel closer to life than death, and not so much in purgatory as that other, better place. My airmanship is oafish, and my grip is too tight on the stick. I can’t keep the nose level. I don’t think I’m breathing. But I’m flying.