On a flight coming in to land at Heathrow from Belfast 20 years ago, there was a wind so strong that it should have had a name.
The plane was like a sailing boat on the high seas, pitching this way and that. The pilot was in the cockpit, presumably grappling with the control wheel and the haphazard thrust of the plane’s engines. Perhaps he was vaguely perturbed as he attempted to land not once, not twice, but three times – each attempt more terrifying than the last.
You know that roaring as a plane’s engines strain? You can imagine the sight, out of your pathetic plastic window, of a runway where the angle is all wrong, when the fast-approaching ground is not as it should be – beneath your chin – but parallel with your temples.
Both my hands were white-knuckling it at the end of each armrest, but I risked unclutching one in order to yank the sick bag from the net pouch in front of me, as globules of sweat formed across the small of my back and face, and my breathing shot to panic mode.
The aftermath of the Air India crash on Thursday, when a plane bound for London hit doctors’ accommodation in Ahmedabad
More than 200 people were killed when the plane crashed just minutes after taking off
Even in my terror, I could see all around me my fellow passengers continuing to read their papers and sip their plastic glasses of water or gin, as if for all the world they were on a sunny river cruise on a stretch of mirror-flat water.
I remember thinking, what is the matter with these people? We are all about to perish and they are either so drunk or so thick they don’t even realise! Why am I the only person who has any insight into our dire situation?
If, as they say, you’ve got as much chance of dying in a plane crash as winning the lottery, my lottery number – and theirs – was clearly up.
I was too frightened – or, perhaps too ashamed – to scream and make a fuss in the face of collective denial by others in the cabin. It felt as though I was being gaslit by them.
Eventually, we slalomed through the air and on to the tarmac with an almighty series of thuds and it took me several seconds to acknowledge we had not crashed and were still alive. It marked the moment I fell out of love with flying.
When the news came out of the awful, tragic Air India crash on Thursday, like everyone else I was horrified and upset. Anyone with any imagination at all could have wept with thoughts of the fear that those poor passengers must have experienced before they died.
‘As a young woman, I used to jump on planes with the cavalier attitude of the majority of flyers,’ says Candida Crewe, but now she is much more reluctant to fly
I neither knew nor had a connection with any of them but my heart goes out to them. One of my sons recently returned from three weeks in Goa on an Air India flight to Gatwick. It is ludicrous and selfish to claim any idea of what the families are feeling but nonetheless that tenuous comparison felt unsettling enough.
We are more likely to be killed by a shark attack or give birth to quadruplets than we are to die in a plane crash, apparently. That is presumably why most people who board the millions of commercial flights every year (35.3million in 2023) do so in a spirit of nonchalance and optimism. We all know it is safer to travel in the air than on the roads. In the period between 2018 and 2022, the worldwide death risk per boarding (a plane) was one in 13.7million.
Maybe that is why news of big plane crashes hits us so hard. We know the statistics are in our favour – until very suddenly and shockingly they are not – and the vivid footage of billowing black smoke, shrapnelled fuselages and destroyed buildings is seared into our memories in a way that an image of a car crash is not.
No matter what the statistics try to make me believe, I’ll never be convinced.
The truth is that we can try to console ourselves with vanishing probabilities, but being flung up in the air in a metal sausage is not something the human mind can easily justify as either safe or reasonable.
Marco Chan, a former airline pilot and senior aviation lecturer at Buckinghamshire New University has countless facts and figures that attest flying is far safer than other modes of transport, yet even he concedes: ‘I always say it’s okay to be scared. Fear of flying isn’t irrational. You’re handing over control to people you’ve never met, in a machine you don’t fully understand, thousands of feet in the air. That’s a big ask.’ Quite.
As a young woman, I used to jump on planes with the cavalier attitude of the majority of flyers. What happened to that carefree 25-year-old who used to think no more of hopping on a plane than a bus?
Maybe it was a flight to my sister’s wedding in the US state of Montana about ten years ago, when the turbulence hit and certain death beckoned. How could it not when we were being jerked around in the sky like ice cubes in a cocktail shaker?
God, how I hate turbulence! I know, I know, planes are designed to withstand it, but turbulence is becoming more and more aggressive and dangerous.
Remember the flight this time last year when a 73-year-old British man died from a suspected heart attack and 104 were seriously injured during a flight from London to Singapore, when it hit severe turbulence and dropped more than 160 feet in four seconds? I do.
And flying across the Atlantic is becoming increasingly turbulent. Next time I want to go to America, it will be on the Queen Mary – even if it does take five days, is ruinously expensive and I’m not overly keen on the sea.
So America, I fear, is out.
Perhaps I should just pull myself together and hark Marco Chan’s words instead: You don’t have to love flying and you don’t have to understand all the systems. But you can take comfort knowing that you are never flying alone. Your safety is supported by thousands of professionals, pilots, cabin crew, engineers, controllers, and inspectors, who make it their full-time job to get you there safely, every single time.’
But the fact still remains that they don’t get you there safely every single time.
Over the past 30 years I have been on 12 flights, tops. I haven’t been on a long-haul flight for a decade or more and there has to be a very good reason for me to catch the plane rather than train for a short haul trip. I forced myself to fly to Seville for a friend’s 60th a few years ago, during which the bumps made me break out in a sweat and I vowed I would never fly again.
Now boarding a flight anywhere really does have to be for an exceptionally good reason. My last domestic one was three years ago – a single flight to Inverness to get back together with someone. It proved one of the most romantic occasions of my life, and we remain together to this day, so that was worth any amount of white-knuckling above Loch Ness.
Even better, he hates flying even more than me.
