The plane didn’t crash, but my confidence in flying did!

How do you feel when you see this picture? Does it remind you of going on holiday, exploring foreign countries or long business trips? For a long time, the view from a plane window, and the feeling of being in any sort of aircraft, terrified me. Flying is still not my favourite thing, but I’m getting better. Just recently, I’ve been writing about my journey with meditation and I was prompted to share this story.

When I was just 13, my family (my mother, father, little brother and myself) went to live in Malaysia for my father’s job. It was 1975 and I’d never been in a plane before. It was all a bit emotional as we said goodbye to family, friends, pets and our home, knowing we wouldn’t be back until the Summer holidays. All that time ago, the Far East was a long, long way away. Almost no-one went there for a holiday and the flight took 24 hours with several stops to refuel, usually one in Europe, one or two in the Middle East and one in India or Sri Lanka. Then you would usually have to change planes in Singapore to get up to KL. We took 10 pieces of baggage with us and my parents knew they would have to buy crockery, sheets, towels etc when we arrived, before we moved into a house. All a bit stressful, no doubt much more so for my parents than for me!

Anyway back to the plane. We took off without incident, on our British Airways VC10 Super. It seemed big and modern to me, but I have since been on an identical plane (on the ground) at Duxford and couldn’t believe how ancient and , well…70s…it seemed! I was relieved to notice how solid it felt, not as if we were flying at all. We landed and took off again somewhere in Europe, maybe Frankfurt, and then again in Baghdad. About an hour out of Baghdad, after our meal, everything had gone quiet and my father, beside me, was snoozing.

Suddenly, everything changed. The plane started to dive sharply, a loud warning BEEP BEEP BEEP sounded, and all the oxygen masks fell out of their cabinets above our heads. There was an announcement that I couldn’t hear properly and one of the stewardesses slid along the aisle past our seats on her bottom as we continued to dive. I dug my nails sharply into my father’s arm to wake him up; I was sure we were crashing. If you have seen the film Castaway with Tom Hanks, the plane crash at the beginning of the film is exactly what this was like, except we didn’t have a hole in our plane and we did level out before we reached the ground/sea.

My mother helped my brother and myself to put on our oxygen masks, forgetting all the instructions to put her own on first. We were lucky she didn’t pass out while she was doing this. I will never forget my 10 year-old brother’s delighted face as he knelt up in his seat to grin at me over the mask, excited by all the drama. I, the sensitive young teenager, was not delighted in the slightest. As far as I was concerned, we were moments from death.

It can only have taken a few minutes for us to dive the four miles needed to equalise the cabin pressure so we could take our masks off. It was then explained to my parents that there had been an electrical fault which resulted in a loss of cabin pressure, the failure of the stall indicator and loss of lights in the cockpit. We were ok, but the plane was limping. We needed to carry on towards Bahrain, our next stop, at just one mile high because of the pressure issue.

Once we got to Bahrain they tried to mend the plane. We were there, walking up and down in the airport, for seven hours, when they finally decided that they couldn’t fix it and they’d have to get us to Singapore another way. I was ever so relieved because I did not want to get back on that aeroplane! They found us space on a Singapore Airlines 747 and somehow transferred all our stuff. The only thing we lost was some of the Travel Scrabble pieces that had gone flying in our steep descent.

I don’t remember being scared on the next plane, but I guess I must have been because I refused to go to the loo. One of the stewardesses asked my mother why I was nervous and she explained what had just happened. The stewardess offered to have a word with me which must have seemed like a good idea. I remember her kneeling up in the seat in front of me and saying, ‘your mummy says you are frightened because of what happened in the other plane.’ She then proceeded to tell me about all the near misses and emergency landings that she had been in, and pointed out that, ‘taking off is the most dangerous time because the plane can stall.’ Ok, great to know that.

We finally arrived in KL for the beginning of our new life 12 hours late, exhausted and emotional, each in our individual way. Please remember that this was 38 years ago and there was so little known by lay people about psychology, trauma and phobias. I didn’t go on another plane until almost a year later, when we flew back to the UK for our annual six week leave. Surprise, surprise, I found it excruciatingly terrifying, especially taking off! There followed years of fear and panic every time I had to fly, and of course that was quite frequent as we lived in two different continents and there were domestic flights that we had to take as well. And then when I was 16 I became one of those kids flying to and fro three times a year on the ‘lollipop special’ – whole planes full of children and teenagers travelling to and from the UK for boarding school. I hated school and I hated flying but I managed it because, well, you have to don’t you, British stiff upper lip and all that. Even the time my brother and I missed our connection in Singapore due to our previous plane being delayed and had to be put up in a hotel overnight.

I started university and my mother, my brother and I relocated to the UK. I stopped flying. Of course that didn’t help, and when, occasionally, I did have to travel by plane for a holiday or to see family, I was in a worse state than ever. Before I stopped drinking at 26 I just used to get very drunk, and on top of the sedatives prescribed by the doctor, the effect meant that I would lose a day at each end of any trip. After I stopped drinking, the terror was still there and I had awful panic attacks, especially on take-off. I flew less and less, and became well acquainted with the Highlands of Scotland, the Western Isles and the Hebrides, as you can get there by car. Now, these are beautiful places, stunning, and I am so glad I have travelled there so much. But it was sad that I wasn’t going further afield because I was too afraid to get in a plane.

I was worried that I would pass on my fear to my son, and remember vividly him sitting on the seat between myself and his father, three year-old legs sticking forwards, saying ‘breathe, Mummy, breathe!’ as I hyperventilated. He hasn’t caught the phobia at all, but he could well have. This was around the time I had some hypnotherapy to try and help the phobia, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. Anyway, once it was just the two of us, I wanted to take my son on holiday and knew that I would be no good as I was. I went on Virgin Atlantic’s Fear of Flying course which was very informative and slightly reassuring, and they took us on a little flight at the end of the day – those of us who could be persuaded to get on the plane, that is! It was good to find I wasn’t the only person with a fear of flying.

I took my son on a trip to Florence to practise my new skills and it was …ok…but not great. I still didn’t like take-off, and I had developed a new dislike of banking (when the plane turns, not the one to do with money!). I was pleased that I managed the trip, though.

A little while after the Florence trip, I started to meditate. I learned how to count my breaths, which is a Buddhist practice. I would count each exhale, one, two, three, up to ten, then start again at one. I got used to the practice and then, when we wanted to travel to Rome, redoubled my efforts. I imagined taking off, while meditating, and this helped me keep the panic at bay. I meditated on the planes and managed to keep much more calm. The trips this time were the best I had ever done, not entirely comfortable, but manageable.

I hadn’t been on a plane for about three years when I had to rush to Dubai last year as my father was very ill, and lives there. It was all very stressful as so many arrangements had to be made quickly, and I had to get my passport renewed, etc etc. I knew I wouldn’t like the flying but also I knew that I had to go. I used my meditation and also my newly learned skill of EFT (Emotional Freedom Therapy, or ‘tapping’). The flight out was ok, but I would probably describe it as ‘controlled terror,’ and I didn’t enjoy it at all. What’s more, I had four days in Dubai, all very stressful and emotional, with the knowledge that I would then have another seven and a half hour flight home again.

The flight home was better. I used the meditation and EFT techniques again, but I also diverted myself by watching three films and trying to forget that I was in a plane. This really helped. I also think that age has helped a lot; for many years, people told me that they just thought to themselves ‘well, the pilot knows what he or she is doing,’ and didn’t bother to worry any further. I seem to have been able to adopt this attitude, just slightly, in middle age! I haven’t yet been able to test out my anti-worry strategies on flying, but I am prepared to find that my fear is a bit too strong to be quashed completely by them!

More than anything, I do realise that leaving long periods of time between flights has not helped at all. If my fear was of bridges, or trains, or something else more mundane, I could have exposed myself to it more frequently. But flying is expensive and not something you can do every week, or in my case every year.

So what is the lesson here? I now know that very often, just one approach is not enough. I put a lot of expectations on the Fear of Flying course and it did help, but only a bit. When I added the meditation, things got a lot better. And then using some distraction, flying became more comfortable still. I expect that I will learn still more strategies that will help further.

Now, I wouldn’t avoid flying if I had the opportunity, and I wouldn’t worry about it beforehand. So that’s a big step, or several steps, forwards. It’s also interesting to note that I was the only one in the family who ended up with a phobia after our mid-air incident. My father went on to fly almost weekly for work and always felt most comfortable in a plane (have you seen Up In The Air? That was my father, almost) and both my mother and my brother have taken the attitude that, according to probability, they are safer now having been through a ‘scrape’, as trouble flying is so rare. My view is, and has always been, that I know what it feels like to hurtle towards the earth in a metal tube with alarms sounding and oxygen masks all over the place, and I will never forget it!

Do you have a phobia or a big fear? Do you know where it came from? And have you managed to overcome it? I would love to hear your stories.