Flying is Scary and Annoying

There is an extremely small, but still very slightly greater than zero, mathematical probability that this will be my incredibly ironic epitaph, so I should try to get this right.

I know, I know. Today, thousands of domestic passenger aircraft took off and landed without any incident. The same thing happened yesterday. (But not the day before yesterday.) The statistical evidence also rings true: air travel, per mile traveled, is somewhere between one and two orders of magnitude safer than travelling as a passenger in an automobile.

Even when a plane crashes, the passengers inside the aircraft are about 95% to survive the incident. To board a plane that crashes is highly unlikely, and to perish in an air crash makes a person extremely unlucky. Like, being stricken by a falling brick while walking down the street-level unlucky.

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There's a common type of sports journalism hackery that proceeds as follows: the journalist/hack begins the print article (it's almost always a print article) by making an argument toward some phenomenon that is, for all intents and purposes, objectively true. For instance, Tiger Woods is one of the greatest golfers of all time, or baseball teams that walk more frequently are more likely to be good baseball teams, or anything else you wish. Regardless of the person, team, or sport described, you can assume that there are literally reams of data supporting the argument, and that most intelligent fans of the sport agree them to be true.

Then, at around paragraph five or six, the journalist/hack completely deconstructs the valid argument presented earlier in the article by talking about what their eyes, or their "gut", or their godforsaken spleen, tells them must be true. Here, you can expect to read some language like "I'm fully aware that what I just wrote about is what the data tells us, or what science tells us, or what most fans believe to be true through taking time and research to explore the objective 'facts,' but there's glory and fantasy and wonder in sports that you must be a journalist to understand."

And then the article turns to complete shit, because glory, fantasy, and wonder are not the reasons why most intelligent adults watch (or care about) sports. The above are nothing but straw men; excuse words for idiots who don't take the time to back up their claims with facts (or are lazy or are rushed to make deadline).

When I read what I wrote above about air travel, and think about what I am about to write below, I think of sports journalism hackery, and I hope against all hope that I am not being a hack (though truthfully, I probably am).

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It seems, though I have no facts to back this up, that (until, strangely enough, about ten years ago) air travel was an extremely risky proposition. Perhaps it was the news cycle sensationalizing extremely rare incidents when they happened, or perhaps it was the uncommon frequency with which musicians decided to fly under poor weather conditions, in wintertime in the North, before sufficient air technology existed to handle the problems which later occurred. (Since 1990, I think Wisconsin has forbidden by law all live music concerts except in instances where the artists agreed to travel to the Cheese-state venue via Madden cruiser.)

Over the past ten years or so, though, I can't think of a major domestic aircraft that spontaneously combusted over the Atlantic Ocean (or worse). It seems - and again, I can't prove this - that flying in the United States has become demonstrably safer while the act of flying in the United States has become incredibly more annoying. This is probably intentional; when an air carrier's 747 spontaneously combusts over the Atlantic (or worse), the air carrier tends to file bankruptcy soon thereafter. Killing paying passengers is not an effective marketing campaign. People are significantly more willing to sit in 17" wide seats and pay $6 for cheese plates; safety is paramount to individual comfort.

The lack of comfort inherent in flying economy class these days, though, is one reason why I'm a nervous flier. I don't like feeling cramped, and I especially don't like feeling cramped while surrounded by 128 coughing strangers (many of whom also happen to be under three years old and are screaming).

The Gambler's Fallacy, which I alluded to above, is another reason. Just because the past ten years of domestic passenger air travel in the United States have been relatively error-free doesn't mean that the next ten will be equally as safe. I fly somewhat more than average (I expect to take 13 - shit - flights in the current year) and, over the course of my lifetime, at least one emergency landing is likely in the cards for me.

(NOTE: If/when I am ever involved in an emergency landing, I fully intend to overreact to approximately the nth degree. I will call everyone in my family to say goodbye to them while in flight, and it'll seem really weird when I live another 30-40 years after my plane lands without injury. I could see this definitely leading to family conflict in the future, with me adamant that I survived against long odds.)

But I have to say, the people flying the airplane make me less (vs. more) nervous about flying. Have you seen an airplane pilot lately? These people are badass; they have ice water in their veins. The Miracle on the Hudson was not a miracle; most pilots would have done the same thing. And if you're flying on anything better than Podunk Airlines, you can be reasonably certain that both of your pilots are at least 40 years old, have been flying for at least twenty of these years, and are constantly monitored for health issues. Further, they probably have high job satisfaction - for 80% of the time they're doing their job, they're out of contact with the outside world and just enjoy the flight.

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I'm less nervous as an airplane passenger than I used to be (I used to spend the entire flight on the verge of massive anxiety attack), but I'll never be calm while traveling in a passenger aircraft. I've been thinking lately about possibly taking flight lessons to counteract my anxiety; I'm the type of person who likes to know how things work, and having the experience of flying a small airplane might (to some extent) help me understand more about "typical" flight behavior (e.g., that uncomfortable feeling three-quarters of the way through the flight when the plane starts descending and it seems, for a brief second, like the engines might be stalling).

Plus, I might find that I actually enjoy the friendly skies. Who knows.