THERE is no question in Abby Larson’s mind that the worst imaginable way to die would be in an airplane crash.
She can picture it exactly, in excruciating, almost comforting, detail: The flames, the screams, the panic, and then — the plane’s sickening drop right out of the sky.
But it’s not just the prospect of death that terrifies her.
“It’s being stuck with 100 other people in an enclosed space and knowing you’re going to die but not being dead yet, with your whole environment being violent,” the 27-year-old from Menlo Park, Calif., said.
It’s a scene she plays on repeat every time she gets on a plane. And it’s one she is absolutely sure will come to pass.
So she’s developed idiosyncratic coping devices to get through a flight. She prays three times, at specific intervals, as she boards the ramp to the plane. She closes her eyes, clasps her hands and counts to 150 as the plane makes its ascent. If the captain dings the seat-belt sign before she’s done, she stops at 200. If the ding is delayed, she continues to 230.
If she doesn’t do everything exactly right, every time, she is certain she will die.
“I’m checking for the exits and figuring out my strategy. I’m constantly looking at other people’s faces to see if other people are getting scared,” she said. “Honestly, you begin to think that you’re crazy.”
With friends and family scattered all over the country, Larson endures her personal hell about every two months. And no matter how often she boards that plane, how many sleeping pills she takes, how many times she tells herself that, statistically speaking, she probably won’t die, she cannot make herself believe that she won’t.
Which is where Jeanne McElhatton comes in.
A licensed pilot, McElhatton loves to fly, and wants to share that love with the estimated one in eight Americans who don’t.
She co-founded the Fear of Flying Clinic in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1976 to help people like Larson fly phobia-free. Meeting four times a year, it’s thought to be the most consistent of a small number of similar clinics around the country, and was where Larson and a dozen other clients spent a recent Saturday in what was, for many, a last-resort effort to quiet their fear.
“We’ve had people come who had had (our clinic) information for two or more years,” McElhatton said. “By the time they do come, they’re really ready to listen.”
Taking a dual approach to their goal, McElhatton and licensed therapist Paula Zimmerman educate their clients about pretty much every aspect of flying imaginable in a knowledge-is-power attempt to rationalize the routine bumps and jolts of air travel, while also teaching them cognitive behavioral methods to change their perceptions about their fears.
“The turbulence is the same, but our attitude toward it (must be) different,” Zimmerman said. “It’s how you think about it. It’s not what’s going on.”
Which, of course, is easier said than done. It’s like trying to quit smoking, she said. You know that it’s bad for you and that you really shouldn’t have a cigarette, but you want one anyway.
But for all the techniques for rationalizing away their fear, what seems to make as much of an impact to the clinic’s white-knuckled fliers is knowing they’re not alone.
“The group experience is what they feel is very, very beneficial,” McElhatton said. “They see, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m not the only one who has this crazy fear going on.’”
Nowhere else but in a room of aviophobes will you have such a vast, collective knowledge of plane crashes through the ages, of hitherto insignificant plane parts that have failed, and of the kind of fear-management techniques that make fliers feel halfway down the road to crazy.
“Everyone has a fear,” Larson said. “Most people just don’t have to face it so frequently.”
Her own fear began when she was 16, and, as is often the case, had nothing to do with flying at all. At an age when invincibility is worn like armor, she got a liver infection that, while not exactly putting her on her deathbed, made her very aware what it would be like.
She transferred her fear of dying onto airplanes, and, coupled with some legitimately bad flying experiences, has been terrified ever since. And it’s not an anxiety that is limited to the flight alone.
For every weeklong vacation she takes, she spends two or three days beforehand anticipating the fear she knows the flight will inspire. The Ambien she takes on the day of travel will rob her of the following day, and that the requisite three-day dread will precede the flight home, giving her a total of two days to enjoy her trip.
“It just becomes exhausting and frustrating because I know that this is stupid and that I’m going to be flying for the rest of my life,” she said.
Though every person’s fear and its manifestations are different, there are several common themes to a fear of flying, McElhatton said. Many people suffer from claustrophobia once the plane door closes, some are terrified by turbulence and an airplane’s foreign noises, others have anxiety or panic attacks while in flight, and some transfer unrelated emotions to their flying experience. And then, of course, there was 9/11, which only made a bad thing worse.
Once they get going, an aviophobe’s imagination can run wild with the various disasters that could occur. Clients at the Fear of Flying Clinic listed the engine breaking off, the body of the plane cracking in half, the pilot losing control and the plane being rocketed into the stratosphere as things they felt certain would happen to the plane they happened to be on.
But the biggest fear seemed to be ceding control to a faceless pilot behind the cockpit door.
Which is where Gail Gorski comes in. A 29-year veteran of the friendly skies, and the first female pilot to be hired by United Airlines, Gorski loves to fly and wants to share that love with those who don’t.
The bulk of the one-day clinic was given over to her to let clients in on the stringent standards to which all pilots are held, from the required training (thousands of hours) to the exhaustive personality profiling (they even look at family mental health history) to the strict physical requirements (Gorski was denied jobs by one airline because her left eye got slightly tired at night) to the simulated training flights in which pilots are taught to recover from literally every possible situation that can arise on a plane (think spins, flips and flying blind.)
And though clients said it was comforting to know the causes behind all the bumps and noises, for many, it was simply seeing Gorski in person and hearing her no-big-deal take on flying that made the biggest impact. “The most important person in the world is on my plane,” she deadpanned to an impressed crowd. “And that’s me.”
McElhatton estimates that about 90 percent of the people who attend the clinic get over their fear. Most clients fly because they have to, and for many, their attendance is the result of a tipping point.
For Toni Gregorio, that moment was just one week prior to the class. She’d been afraid of flying for about 10 years despite enjoying it as a young adult, but there she was, literally about to board a plane with her mother to spend the holidays in Germany, and she just couldn’t do it. So she and her mother collected their things and headed home.
“After that, I was so angry with myself,” the 42-year-old from San Jose said. “I’d let myself down, I’d let my mother down. I said, ‘I can’t keep doing this.’” For her, the fear stemmed from a fear of losing control and had gotten so bad that she was afraid to go over freeway overpasses because they made her feel the same sense of panic and helplessness.
But sharing her fear with peers, learning to confront her irrational thoughts with rational ones and learning about the concept of redundancy — in which plane systems have backups for backups in case of failure — made her hopeful that she might just be OK.
“I feel good about having taken the class,” she said. “I don’t feel 100 percent better, but I feel like I have some sort of control and may get on a plane again.”
And she’s already got the perfect test. Because that ticket to Germany is good for a whole year.
