Jetblue incites irrational fears

I felt (and still feel) a sickening anxiety in the pit of my stomach and shortness of breath as I watched this video showing that Jetblue landing at LAX. I could only begin to imagine the fear while circling around for 3 hours before descending into uncertainty. Kudos to the pilots for doing an excellent job at landing the plane, whose front wheels were stuck sideways.

I have an irrational fear of flying that grows stronger with every year that passes. It sucks, too, since I love to travel. I have to put up with days of sickening anxiety before I go on a trip. Last year as I was traveling from Cairo to Frankfurt, we hit a storm over the Balkans that made me so tense I was sore the next day. When I looked out the window, I could see the horizon bouncing up and down- one minute I could see only the ground, the next, only the sky. To top it all off, they were playing that horrible Garfield movie, so there was nothing to take my mind off of it. Even the flight attendents were buckled up.

That isn't the worst flight I've been on. That would be my flight down to Basic Training at Fort Jackson. I had flown from Columbus, Ohio to Raleigh-Durham, and I switched to a tiny 20-seat prop plane to go to Columbia. Since the flight was less than an hour, we couldn't fly very high, and we flew directly through a storm cloud the whole time. It was one continuous flash of lightening that I saw out the window. One strike to one of the two propellers- ack. I don't even want to think about it.

Irrational fears are a strange human trait. Everyone is afraid of something, even those people who say they are afraid of nothing. I don't know how I developed my fear of flying, but it wasn't when I was going back and forth to Europe during and after college. I remember feeling a bit nervous making my last transatlantic flight to Dublin in 2000. Some people believe that fears like this are leftover from something happening to you in a past life. I wish I could believe that, because then, statistically, my chances of dying in a plane crash are drastically reduced to nearly nonexistent. Sadly, I don't believe in that, so I must put up with my irrational fear every time I buy a plane ticket.

Tag: Jetblue