The Friendly Skies
by Jim Curtiss

What do David Bowie, Mr. T, Lars von Trier and the Dalai Lama have in common? If you guessed that they all like fancy clothes, guess again. If you guessed that they all dislike flying, you get yourself a pair of shiny plastic pilot’s wings.

I too, dislike flying. And although I accept it as a consequence of choosing to live across an ocean from my homeland, I am nonetheless a reluctant flyer. My aversion to the friendly skies could possibly be in the genes, as mom is nearly phobic when it comes to flying, but on the other hand, dad is a cool customer in planes, and seems to sleep easier in the sky than in a bed.

So if my parents represent opposing ends of a joy of flying scale, I suppose I would tend toward my mother’s side. It might just be a control thing, that is, my fear of putting my life into someone else’s hands, or it could be the totally understandable fear of heights. But more likely these days is all the nonsense that’s been going on in the world when it comes to aviation.

Just two days ago for example, 19 suspects were arrested, and some remain at large, for having planned to blow up as many as 10 airliners. Such a plot is obviously atrocious, and my hat is off to the UK security forces for spoiling it. Great work, M15.

But step back from the hellishly unsavory prospect of such an attack for a moment, and one can understand why terrorists would want to attack planes in the first place – it’s not jealousy of freedom or even cowardice, as the governments or the media profess, but rather an evil shrewdness on the part of the plotters.

Perhaps one of them even read the article titled Do We Fear the Right Things? by David G. Myers, a professor of psychology at Hope College in Holland. In that paper, Myers states that psychological science has identified four influences on our intuitions about risk. First, we fear what our ancestral history has prepared us to fear. Human emotions, he says, were road tested in the Stone Age, and flying may very well be far safer than biking, but our biological past predisposes us to fear confinement and heights, and therefore to fear flying.

Second, he says, we fear that which we cannot control. Even though it is far more dangerous, driving is something we can control, whereas flying we cannot.

Third, we fear what is immediate. Much of the plane's threat, he says, is telescoped into the moments of takeoff and landing, while the dangers of driving are diffused across many moments which range from completely safe to potentially life-threatening.

Fourth, we fear what's most readily available in memory. One needs only an instant, for example, to envision the World Trade Center attacks.

The main point that Myers makes is this: availability in memory provides our intuitive rule-of-thumb for judging risks. It is a small wonder then that most of us perceive plane accidents as more lethal than car accidents. For when we see a plane crash, the flames, the drama, the unfulfilled promise of those countless lives lost are truly horrific. They are no more so than the car crashes that you rubberneck along your daily commute, but the scale is what makes the difference.

But like a lot of people, I don’t give a damn what experts like Myers tell me. I know that it’s illogical to be afraid of flying, that the numbers say it’s safe, that I have a better chance of drowning in my coffee than of dying in a plane crash, and so on. Nevertheless, the odds of some lunatic smuggling a vail of liquid explosives into my back seat and then detonating it is far, far less than it seems to be in today’s friendly skies.

Indeed, the most recent alarm bells sounded far too late to affect my decision not to accompany my wife to Australia for a conference, to which she flew on Aug. 8th, one day before the latest UK terror plot was thwarted.

It was during her check-in for the required 24 hours of flight time, I later learned, that the security guard found but then allowed her to take aboard, my lucky penknife – the one we bought on our honeymoon.

Let me repeat that: On August 8th, airport security found a knife but still let it be taken aboard a plane.

And then just a day later, after M15 thwarted that nefarious plot to blow up planes over the Atlantic, people are being instructed that they are allowed to take aboard only their most necessary belongings, such as medicines and identification, and in transparent plastic bags to boot. No reading material, only airline movies and screaming babies to while the time away.

All of which only confirms my opinion that after we sort out global warming and the Middle East question, we should then do away with flying by simply moving the continents back together again.

Long live Pangaea!