Landed in Columbus last night, via Philadelphia. Early critical reviews suggest I did a very good job as an air passenger, significantly exceeding all expectations based on past performance.
See
my Twitter feed from yesterday for the blow-by-blow, plus some postmortem commentary. Somehow the flight on the smaller jet between PHL and CMH was honestly one of the smoothest plane trips I've ever had, maybe
the smoothest on a sub-747 airplane. We flew in a straight line over the gently snowing clouds for a full hour, surrounded by a pitch black sky and more stars than I've seen since I was in college. (And it reminded me how much I'd like to do some proper stargazing again, sometime.)
Things I did differently, between yesterday's flights and previous ones:
* Used LJ and Twitter as I did.
A stylish pilot-wings pin from me to all who sent along their good thoughts; you all helped me tremendously.
• Read (several weeks ago)
Captain Stacey Chance's online multimedia essays for aviophobes preparing to fly. Despite its Web 0.9 layout, its frequent dips into inspirational-poster corniness, and its conclusion in a pitch for books and CDs by the good captain, it contains what was for me a small wealth of great advice. I found that, when things got juddery on the plane and I started getting nervous, thinking on these lessons calmed me down immediately.
My favorite single takeaway from "Capt. Stacey" is that, to an airplane moving at typical speed, the air rushing past "feels" like a much thicker fluid that it usually does to us groundlings. In the past, I'd try to think of the plane like a great ship on the sea, but now I had a much better metaphor: it was like a submarine! It wasn't skimming atop the medium that always threatened to swallow and destroy it; it was part of it, surrendered to it utterly, and therefore its master. Such an elegant and beautiful image.
So when the plane passed through turbulence and my hindbrain said
Ugh! Plane shaking! Wind trying to kill us! Flee!, I would picture this image. The new perspective really took the edge off of the fear.
• Consumed no coffee -- or anything else caffeinated -- beyond my wake-up cup. A lesser challenge than usual, because my body was too distracted by the stress of travel to cry out for its afternoon dosage.
(And I allowed myself two and a half glasses of wine at the dinner party, but my flight-nervousness is so sobering that it's hard to tell whether it had any effect. Definitely didn't hurt, though.)
• Used
the NOAA's live turbulence charts to see what we could expect to fly through. This was on
mr_choronzon's advice, and it really did help. It added a little bit of dread to see some orange-colored moderate turbulence in our flight path, but this ended up being a fair price to pay for losing the surprise and confusion of encountering it unexpectedly.
• Sat beside
classicaljunkie the whole time. Yes, I did this last year as well, but this year we had reason to mutually support each other: on the first leg she was really stressed out by all the children on board, something that doesn't perturb me so much. Worst was the toddler who tried to relieve his holiday hyperactivity by bashing at her seat-back with his shiny new Tonka truck while singing his very own Christmas song into her ear. Poor Amy! So it was nice to be able to lend her some support right back. (The kid situation was awful enough to move the
leggings-and-Uggs-clad teenager sitting on Amy's other side to join us in hushed commiseration.)
• When we banked, I could pull up my iPhone's compass and watch as our heading changed and then restabilized. Where my hindbrain could before cry
Ugh! Plane is drooping out of sky! Flee!, I could now wash the whole system with undeniable visual evidence that this was happening for a good reason. And by god this helped shut the damned caveman up.
• I learned a new mantra from
a TED Talk that Ze Frank gave recently. (The particular story, and eventually the song, begins at 14:20.) I have used mantras on planes since I first became afraid of flying, and they have evolved from genuine prayers to God for safety to repetitions of songs I like. I found this one effective because of the story of community behind it -- I really am a sap for stories like this -- and it tied in thematically with how I leaned on y'all for support, too.
While I can't say I'm looking forward to the flight back -- I haven't regained my long-lost ability to read while in-flight yet, for example -- I'm not in bring-me-my-brown-pants mode about it either.