I have to fly from Las Vegas to Reno next Thursday, and back to Las Vegas on the following Sunday.
It is a business/pleasure trip.
Don’t get me wrong. I have flown lots of times all over the world, but I just hate to fly. Had a couple of bad experiences and it always makes me nervous. Here I am, 6 days away from the trip and already I am thinking in terms of “I have had a good life and…”
I won’t wimp out. I will grudgingly get on the plane and I will sit, white-knuckled for the short hour and ten minute flight and spend the next three days dreading the return flight home.
I know it is irrational, but - remind me again why flying is really no big deal.
You’ll have to make up your mind that you won’t let the dread about the upcoming flight ruin your trip. It hardly makes it worth it if you fret the entire time you’re in Vegas.
You’ll be in Vegas, fercryinoutloud! Sin City! The City That Never Sleeps! The Home of Don Ho!
I was in a plane from Iceland to Luxemburg and one of the engines caught on fire. They had to turn off all the engines and the bells were ringing, flight crew dashed to their seats and we went into a nose dive. While we were going down, I was actually rather calm…only when the engines started to come back on (you have to build up speed to turn them on, there is no “on switch” for jet engines I learned later) and we leveled out, that I was not so good. There were three of us who had to be helped from the plane when we finally landed.
Another time I was in a small plane that went up in good weather and then hit a blizzard. We couldn’t land at the destination airport and had to make an emergency landing at a different airport. We missed a cyclone fence by about 5 feet.
And once I landed in Denver, in a jet that had the FRONT wheel land first due to something called wind sheer. And while waiting at the airport, we saw the televisions reporting on a huge air crash in LA ( it was the AirMexico plane) and to top it off, the plane we were supposed to get on had “problems” and they gave it a “test flight” before letting us on for the final leg of the trip.
So…adding it all up, no disaster, but enough to make me skittish.
And Ruby, I live in Las Vegas…I am flying to Reno.
Thought about that, but believe me - the road from Las Vegas to Reno is horrible…poorly upkept, two lane, middle of nowhere, danger of hitting animals crossing the road, and it takes about 4 hours in good conditions to drive. Las Vegas to LA is a snap…four lane all the way and the last business trip was there and I didn’t mind the drive at all.
Your first experience doesn’t sound right, are you sure of the details? For one thing, jet engines do have an “on” switch, that’s how they start them on the ground, and for another, engines aren’t just switched off for no reason.
But, I don’t want to suggest that your experiences weren’t nerve racking, I’m quite sure they were. I think the main problem with flying is that a. you don’t really know what’s going on and whether anything is normal or not, and b. you have absolutely no control over your situation. At least if you are a passenger on a bus you can yell out “look out for that car!” or something. In an aircraft you can do nothing, and many people don’t like that feeling.
Remember though, that the crew flying your aircraft do it day after day, week after week, month after month, for many years, and nothing ever really happens. The job is quite dull, and they like it that way. Your flight from Iceland is an example of something going wrong on the aircraft and the crew dealing with it, it would be something they train for, and essentially a non-event. Ultimately there’s nothing really, that anyone can say, they are your demons and you must find your own way of dealing with them.
I just think about the fact that any time any plane crashes anywhere in the country, it makes the national news. So, yeah, we freak out about it a little. But then there are more than 10,000 auto accidents in the US every day. Around 40,000 people die in car crashes in the US every year! That’s more than 100 a day, on average.
Next to that, riding in an airplane seems as safe as houses. (On average, there are only around 50 plane crashes in the whole world each year, with around 1,500 fatalaties.)
If I dwell on this too much, though, it makes me to scared to get into the car. And I don’t know if this will help, considering all the trouble you’ve had in planes.
If it were me, I’d just fall back on the Gambler’s Fallacy. You’ve had more than your share of negative airborne experiences. From here on in, the Universe couldn’t possibly expect you to endure anything worse than an in-flight movie staring Paulie Shore.
Well, it sounds simple-minded when I say it out loud, but this is what worked for me: I fly cross-country about three times a year to visit family, and I used to be nervous about it because it was kind of a mystery how the whole business worked. When I’m in a car, I’m still aware of all the thousands of things that can (and do, often) go wrong, but I don’t spend the entire time uneasy about why the car is on the ground.
Finally, I just decided to get a high-level introduction to aerodynamics. I forget whether it was in a book, or online, or television, but it was just a basic super-simplified explanation: the shape of the wing causes air to move faster over the top of the wing than under the bottom. Faster-moving air has lower pressure than slower-moving air, which creates lift. When you put it in that simple terms, you realize that there are more fundamental forces trying to keep the plane in the air than those trying to make it fall.
Simple statistics should be enough to convince everyone that flying is okay – there are far, far more completely safe, boring, uneventful flights than ones with even the most minor incident. But the human brain doesn’t work that way, or else gambling wouldn’t be such an addiction.
As I understand it from other threads around here, it’s been determined that the differing flow is only part of the lift generated. Apparently, the wing is just a low-drag “barn door” that is slightly tilted up at high speed, and it gets most of its lift the same way your hand does when you stick it out the car window. You can search on the board for more info.
Yes, it’s a nitpick. The real point that there are very fundamental forces lifting the airplane is a good one.
DMark, I’m with 1920s Style “Death Ray” on this one; I’m wondering if one of the following actually happened:
There was an engine fire and while addressing the fire the flight crew also reduced power on the remaining engine(s) to expedite a descent for the emergency landing or
An engine or engines “flamed out” and the flight crew had to dive to get sufficient airspeed and turbine RPM to affect a restart. “Flamed out” may have been a term you heard used on that flight that does not generally have anything to do with an engine fire, except to say that normal combustion in the engine has stopped for some reason (fuel starvation/contamination, ice ingestion, throttle linkage malfunction, etc).
It’s tough to imagine a situation where an engine fire would motivate the crew to shut down the remaining engines with the intent to restart them, but perhaps it’s possible.
Either way, as far planes go I’ll take a turbine (jet) engine any day for reliability. They are simpler and more elegant than piston engines in most ways. Fires and failures are extremely exceptional. Furthermore, your big jets are all certified to fly based on the assumption that an engine will fail during pretty much any phase of flight – which just means that it will safely continue flying after losing an engine.
No, I think the differing flow causes all of the lift, but it is not bernouli that entirely causes the differing flow. Thats where the confusion seems to be.
I’m a complete chicken shit.
The last time I flew my company sent me to Crystal lake Ill. It’s about an hour and a half flight fom Memphis to Chicago.
We had a lot of turbulance that kept me on edge the whole flight. The passenger next to me could tell I was scared shitless and begins telling me how much safer flying is than driving.
I wasnt buying it at all. I was so happy to be on the ground I almost cried.
The rest of the time at the Crystal Lake facility I was fine until I had to fly home.
I dont know if I’ll ever fly again unless I absolutley have to.
