Incentive to fly...

[StPeteMark]

...it is the pure and simple fact that you can die in the safe confines of your own home just as well as you can die on a plane. <clip>

This has all given me time to pause and re-evaluate, and I just know that no matter how safe you think you are or how safe you play it, when it is your time to go, that's it...no matter where you happen to be. I cut this part of Courtney's post from another thread because these thoughts are very similar to mine before I made the decision to get back on a plane and fly again back in 2003.

When you finally realize that life is and can be shorter than you planned, you want to make the most of every day. Then you can find the courage to push yourself to do whatever it takes to fly!!! For flying will open up a new world of opportunities and greatly expand your quality of life!!!

As Jess said awhile back, "Life is short, play hard!"
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[acuradriveronr3train]

I think that it's the fear of what may lead up to death and the condition of the body after death that makes someone like me fearful of going on a plane. Knowing that the plane is in an irreversible tailspin, and less than a minute from now, you're going to be "burned beyond recognition" is a prospect more fearful to me than my diabetes or high cholesterol (problems resulting from careless food choices made at a younger age) leading to a massive heart attack while I'm asleep in which my body will at least still be reasonably intact (assuming I'm found the next day, before decomposition begins to set in).

I know that a lot of people in my generation and younger want to be cremated when their time comes, but I'm opting for burial. So, I don't want my cause of death to be something that more or less cremates me.

And in another irony, when my time comes, as I've hinted above, I'd probably prefer to go in my sleep. When I was a child, dying in my sleep was one of my big fears.

I had an interesting dream/nightmare last night related to my fear of being in a plane crash. Twelve years ago, on Halloween no less, there was a crash of an American Eagle plane in Indiana in which everyone on board was killed. I learned from a news account of the crash that one of the people who died was a woman who was only in her mid-20s who was on the "fast track" at a company I had been laid off from ten years earlier. I had worked for that company for several years and was frustrated in my attempts to advance, for various reasons. (Incidentally, gender discrimination was not one of these reasons. The company had a good record in promoting women.) I remember wondering at the time whether I'd rather be 42 with a steady but unspectacular work record or suddenly dead at 25 but having based in the glow of being one of the up-and-coming stars where I worked at the time of my death. I even thought at the time that it was a toss-up.

In the dream I had last night, I was that young woman from my ex-employer, and while I don't recall the circumstances of that crash, I was on that plane as it was plummeting to the ground and scared out of my mind. A great future was quickly becoming no future.

Now, of course, I'm glad to still be alive at 54, with a lot of good things having happened to me in all areas of my life, despite never having been a big star of the future at any company where I've worked. (I do feel very appreciated where I work now, however.)

[StPeteMark]

Whoa, DriverTrain, "incentive" is the key word here.

I used to have those bummer gruesome thoughts about flying, but now I've shifted them to driving where it's about 1000+ times more likely to happen. I now love flying and, if by a slim chance something did happen, I would not be around to care what happens to my body. I'm 55 and want to travel as my budget and work will allow.

Yes, I had a comfortable life within a 100-mile radius for those 15+ years where I didn't even consider flying. We took a few trips around the country that took 2-3 weeks either by car or train. Now, I have essentially no mental limits for travel destinations; like, I can go from Tampa to San Francisco in about 6-7 hours and spend those driving days at the destination.

When it's my time to go, I don't want to regret not doing something because I played it safe for unfounded reasons.
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[tabbygirl]

One of the various thoughts that got me to actively address my fear of flying was that I didn't want to be on my deathbed, wishing I'd seen Italy. (So I saw Greece instead! That was worth "learning to fly.")

I'm sure all of us hope to pass away quietly in our sleep, but I'm not sure how likely that is.

It's true that you can freak yourself out thinking of the terror of plunging to earth in a plane. On the other hand, I can freak myself out thinking of my 46-year-old cousin dying slowly of kidney failure as a result of diabetes. Or my 52-year-old friend who's battling breast cancer via nasty, nasty chemo. She's been terrified for, literally, years.

I've had my own brush with breast cancer and I'm hovering on the cusp of Type II diabetes (it's rampant in my family) and it's definitely made me more determined not to limit my life due to any kind of anxiety, which I used to do way too much.

The joy of learning how to RELEASE the fear is just indescribable.

[aerobat]

St.PeteMark said:

Then you can find the courage to push yourself to do whatever it takes to fly!!! For flying will open up a new world of opportunities and greatly expand your quality of life!!!


Angela said:

The joy of learning how to RELEASE the fear is just indescribable.

Finding courage, in and of itself, will open up new worlds to us. Pushing past what seemed an insurmountable barrier and breaking out of the cage is an amazing, life-changing accomplishment. And then, getting to fly to cool places is, well, dessert. :lol::happyguy::tongue:

[Passenger Mark]

Wow... the movies really do spin our imagination!

Personally when I am gone (however that happens) I could care less what happens to my body, I for sure will be done with it! However, I guess I knid-of do, because my instructions are to be cremated... because... well... I don't want to take up a hotel space where I ain't staying!

As for Mark's original post... this is from something I wrote here several weeks ago...

Think about this... we manage to avoid risks by not doing anything or going anywhere. We end up very old and in a nursing home looking out the window from our beds. We look up and see the contrail of a jet going overhead. And we wonder what we did with our life.

[aerobat]

acuradriver said:

In the dream I had last night, I was that young woman from my ex-employer, and while I don't recall the circumstances of that crash, I was on that plane as it was plummeting to the ground and scared out of my mind. A great future was quickly becoming no future.

One of the things that many fearful fliers share is an inordinate degree of identification with the passengers on doomed flights. It was very true of me. Sometimes it was just single individuals whose stories I heard about, or who were friends or relatives of someone I knew. In one case, I learned that the aunt of a friend who had been on AA191, the DC-10 that crashed at O'Hare after takeoff, was a fearful flier!!! That made it all the worse, because I could so easily imagine being her during the awful, 300-foot plunge.

But we have to stop doing this to ourselves. We are not helpless.

You so strongly identify with this young woman--for understandable reasons--that in your dream you became her in the midst of that disaster. It was caused, by the way, by rapid accumulation of ice on the aircraft, and the pilots lost control, as I recall, when they repositioned the flaps.

Do you believe that because this was recreated in your dream that you have no control over it, or that the dream somehow foretells your future, or that it is a credible warning? Isn't it more likely that our dreams dredge up things we are brooding about and are only partly aware of, as well as things we actively ruminate on, and dish them out to us as another chapter of our ongoing struggles?

There's a practice in dreamwork called 'active imagination' in which we go back through our dreams soon after waking and carry them to conclusion, or seek the subtext, or follow different lines of the narrative, and explore/postulate what we honestly feel is the real message. I can't tell you what your dream means in terms any more specific than that fearful fliers over-identify with the victims of air disasters--to the point of being totally grounded. I have been there. It was a trap, a lie, a neurochemical deception that recruited all my intelligence and creativity and imagination to its service.

But when I really got to work on my fear of flying, my dreams rallied to my side. MY side--the side that had finally chosen to break free of this deception. Maybe that door will open for you. There's no reason why not.

In the meantime, it's vital to stop the cascade of negative imagery while we are awake. Do you know the rubber band trick?

Barb

[WillFlyToDisney]

Good points, Barb.

My college sweetheart Eddie died in a helicopter crash last year. I have found myself on many occasions thinking of him when I am on a plane descending to land. I wonder how high up he was when he knew there was trouble and how far the helicopter fell to the ground. I can imagine the whole thing in my head and have relived that in my dreams many times.

I have no intention of ever being on a military helicopter in the desert so I know I won't be put in that same exact situation but knowing Eddie and feeling a closeness with him for so many years makes me identify with the crash and it is very disturbing.

I don't know that it is necessarily unhealthy to have thoughts about crashing as long as we can work thru them in our minds with rationale and logic and remind ourselves that just because we think it doesn't mean it will happen to us.

On my flight Saturday nite I was a bit uneasy and found myself thinking that they wouldn't be able to identify my body if we crashed b/c I was wearing a new pair of pants that didn't have pockets and wasn't carrying my ID like I always do when I fly. I landed safely obviously and laughed at myself for having such a silly thought.

[EyesSkyward]

This raises an interesting (and completely hypothetical) question. Let's say you had the choice of one of the following:

A) Living a rather ordinary life in which you never travelled far from your current home, never did anything too risky, but were guaranteed to die peacefully in your sleep.

B) Living an equally long life of adventure. Meeting new and exciting people. Seeing all the wonders the planet has to offer. Wandering the great cities of the world. Experiencing exotic food and cultures. But... it would be an absolute certainty that the last 30 seconds of your life would be sheer terror. Maybe in a plane. But it might also be on a train, or at the end of a gun barrel, or running from a stampede of angry rhinos, or whatever.

Which would you choose?

We're talking about less than a minute out of a life that spans decades. Are our final moments so important that we're willing to compromise the entire rest of our lives for them?

- Jeff

[acuradriveronr3train]

The main reason I want to overcome my fear of flying is to be able to go to many different places. I was fortunate during the recent six-year period in which I didn't fly that there were some places closer to home that I also had wanted to see but hadn't seen because I was too busy going to far away places!

For instance, I got to take the Auto Train. And I got to drive on most of the length of the Skyline Drive/Blue Ridge Parkway, although some of it was closed due to damage from one of the 2004 hurricanes.

I don't know why I had that dream. Maybe because it was the same time of year. (Halloween must be tough for anyone who had friends or relatives on that plane.) I did read up on the accident and learned about the ice that formed on the wings after I posted here.

Another thing I remember about that crash is that a few weeks later, while the Philadelphia Eagles (Fluffy Iggles) football team was going through a long losing streak, I put together some song parody ideas about it. Most of the song ideas were taken from songs by the rock group called the Eagles, but I also thought about doing one based on the Steve Miller Band song "Fly Like an Eagle". My original idea was "Crash Like the Eagles", but with the American Eagle crash having occurred so recently, I changed it to "Lose Like the Eagles".

Someone that I didn't meet until the 1990s had a sister who was a flight attendant on the Pan Am plane in the big accident in the Canary Islands in 1977. He said that he was so upset by her death that he had to drop out of college. She was his only sister. He had two brothers. A few weeks after he told me about her, which was in 1996, I saw in the paper that one of his brothers drowned while on a fishing trip. (The brother's obituary mentioned that he was survived by two brothers and that he had had a sister who was killed in a plane crash but didn't give any more details about the crash.)

[tabbygirl]

I know which one I would choose, too...

I mentioned above that one of my friends is battling breast cancer. Her treatment has been very difficult and the cancer is pretty aggressive. (Her progress is good, though.) She really has been terrified for years now...this is a recurrence of her original cancer 6 years ago, and she spent a lot of that time being certain it would come back. So frightened and angry (naturally enough).

Well, she was right. But was that worth spending so much energy on the fear during those 6 years?

She also has a number of phobias - some large like fear of flying, others seemingly less so - and all of them have limited her ability to live as big a life as she could have done. Like so many of us, she's tried her best to avoid things that are scary...I certainly know all about that, having done it for years myself.

And now she is facing this very difficult battle anyway. Believe me when I say that this situation has given me so much food for thought.

When I went to Greece she said something like, "I'll bet flying is nothing compared to going through chemo" and I told her that I was sure she was right!

[aerobat]

I also know which life I would choose, if those were the terms.
But, knowing ahead of time that one will live a long life well into old age and THEN comes that terrifying 30-second interval...well that kind of compromises it. Because in a real life of adventuring, which I have had, and continue to have, risk is present. One goes through a process of balancing risk and reward every time the risk is taken. There isn't a long philosophical debate, but there is an emotional quality wrapped up with planning, determination, courage, and very often teamwork--and it's all woven together into a state of mind which is itself rewarding, apart from the reward of achieving the risky undertaking. So, removing the possibility of a fatal outcome would wash out the intensity and lessen the value of the goal.

And then, I would like to think that those last thirty seconds really do matter. A lot of religions place supreme importance on the last few seconds before death, because that is when one is to face eternity, hopefully with composure and focus on God if one has prepared oneself. It doesn't seem right--or fair--that it should all fall apart right there at the end, no matter the exact nature of the end (being eaten by a T. rex after having one's time machine malfunction on some remote Jurassic shore...:cuss: piece of junk!!).

I have an engineer/caver friend (Bill Stone) who works for NIST, and who is the epitome of world-class adventurer. There was an Outside magazine cover article about him a few years back, concerning his expeditionary cave diving in Mexico. The article was somewhat critical of the way he pushes the edge and drives a team to its very limits, but the corresponding National Geographic article about the deep cave dive he made with his wife was much fairer and more accurate. Bill designs divers' rebreathers and rocket guidance systems. He wants to be--and likely will be--a private-sector astronaut. He envisions his end as dying alone on some other planet, stranded in the midst of, say, mineral exploration. And he envisions it as a state of acceptance--a fair price paid for a life lived to the max.

That seems fair to me.

Kelley, in response to what you said:

I don't know that it is necessarily unhealthy to have thoughts about crashing as long as we can work thru them in our minds with rationale and logic and remind ourselves that just because we think it doesn't mean it will happen to us.

I agree with you about this.
When I spoke of "stopping the cascade of negative imagery" I meant the emotional state of adrenaline-driven runaway imagery that quickly pushes our anxiety up into the red zone. This is a state that one must learn to control in order to deal with the anticipatory anxiety, and also to build confidence that one can handle one's feelings--whatever they may be--on the plane. I think that as one starts to learn the techniques and practice them, it's best to try to set aside all the negatives. But after we gain some control over this stuff, we can work with such images and thoughts as 'crashing'. We can control the way in which we engage this emotionally, just as you now are able to do. The feelings are always going to be uncomfortable, but they don't launch the cascade.

I also think that "normal" fliers have these thoughts. I have certainly been told that by many people who don't consider themselves fearful fliers, including people who fly a lot. They experience them, and then they manage them, and perhaps later laugh at them. :thumbsup: Heck, I have images of car accidents pop up nearly every day I commute to the airport--there's a busy stretch where peoples' rudeness is ratcheted up exponentially as they (er, we) hurtle toward a one-lane bridge at 65 mph., whose lane then merges with that of another bridge. It's a rotten piece of highway engineering, at least for the current traffic load.

There's a breakthrough, however, in shifting from not being able to stop the negative cascade to being able to. And it can come as such a surprise that we can learn to able to; it has the quality of miracles and achieving the impossible.

To return to SPMark's original theme, 'finding courage' is at the heart of this process. Courage is its own reward. :)

Barb

[acuradriveronr3train]

It was interesting to me that you mentioned the Skyline. One year we drove it because we were with a friend with FOF and we drove on vacation rather than fly. We were taking a ride on the Skyline when unexpectedly we were blanketed in the thickest fog. It was incredibly scary. We couldn't see enough to even know where it would be safe to pull over. It was really dangerous and all to avoid the "danger" of flying.

We didn't run into fog on the Skyline Drive part of the trip, but we did on the Blue Ridge Parkway portion. We had to bail out and take other roads. So, not being able to travel the whole road due to both storm-related washouts and fog was a disappointment.

And I would take the adventuresome life. I suffered from a painful condition about 2 1/2 years ago. I didn't get any treatment that worked for the first two weeks. The Skyline Drive/Blue Ridge Parkway/Great Smokeys trip was a reward to myself for recovering from this. My usual traveling companion and I walked several trails along the route, including two mountain climbs. Seven months earlier, I never thought I would ever be able to walk, let alone climb mountains, again.