[Infowarrior] - The Cost of High Anxiety About Flying

[Richard Forno]

The Cost of High Anxiety About Flying
January 1, 2010
By LIESL SCHILLINGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/weekinreview/03schillinger.html

Everyone knows that flying in a plane is potentially dangerous — just  
as everyone knows that climbing Mount Everest is dangerous. What goes  
up must come down; and if you put yourself at a great height, you put  
yourself at risk of falling, though the odds of perishing in a plane  
crash are one in ten million, whereas for every ten Everest climbers  
who reach the peak, one dies ... a far less comfortable margin.

One reason that airports have bars, and that flight attendants ply  
passengers with beer, wine and cocktails, is that flight industry  
higher-ups are well aware that a drink or two can calm the nerves of  
timorous fliers, and that indeed most of their customers fear air  
travel to some degree. If you doubt the truth of this, take a look at  
your seatmates the next time a plane you’re on hits an air pocket and  
drops before righting itself. You’ll see your fellow passengers (some  
of them, anyhow) praying — hoping divine intervention will keep the  
magical container aloft. Regina Spektor wove this thought into her  
album, “Far” last June, in the song “Laughing With,” which goes, “No  
one laughs at God when their airplane starts to uncontrollably shake.”  
It’s the 21st century, but that doesn’t keep flying from remaining, on  
one level, an act of faith.

Nearly all of the millions of flights that take off and land each year  
proceed safely, without incident. Any number of accidents can (but  
rarely do) put a flight in jeopardy: from engine failure, to the  
sudden apparition of a flock of geese, to electrical storms, to ice,  
to air pockets. But in the last decade, beginning with the 9/11  
attacks, the greatest assault on faith in air travel has come not from  
accidents but from intentional acts of sabotage by a handful of  
homicidal malefactors. Statistically, their criminal actions barely  
register. But the ripple effect of public panic at the notion that any  
passenger on any plane could be a human time bomb has rattled the  
airline industry and compromised the freedom of travel that the  
world’s citizens previously enjoyed.

We understand other countries and other peoples best by seeing them;  
to see them, we must travel; to travel, in any concision of time, we  
must fly. Last week, one man with a grievance and exploding underpants  
boarded a plane for Detroit. This week, the nation’s attention and  
travel plans in the new year are held captive, as the battered  
American airline industry reels — this after a few months in which  
airline stocks had finally climbed out of a deep hole, anticipating  
the possibility of increased air travel in 2010.

The risk of a terrorist disruption of a flight is infinitesimal, but  
public perception of that risk can be outsize and emotional ...  
understandably so. Terrorists, like bogeymen, are frightening even  
when they don’t exist; and when they do appear in broad daylight,  
citizens who learn that the government failed to shield them from  
menace feel vulnerable and outraged.

In the wake of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s attempted sabotage,  
government and air travel officials are scrambling to reassure the  
citizenry — investigating information-sharing deficits, suggesting  
rapid deployment of full-body magnetic resonance scans (a  
controversial and expensive measure) and adding blankets and bathroom  
visits to the perks that air travelers may no longer expect in the age  
of high anxiety.

And yet, from the point of view of the individual traveler, a risk- 
free flight has never existed; nor has a risk-free car trip; nor a  
risk-free ocean liner voyage; nor a risk-free bike ride. To be alive  
is to face risks.

When I was a child in Indiana, about to head to France to live with a  
French family for a month — my first foreign trip — something happened  
that nearly kept that journey from taking place. On May 25, 1979, a  
few weeks before my plane was to leave Chicago for Paris, a DC-10 took  
off from O’Hare, then crashed and exploded, killing all 271 people on  
board and 2 more on the ground.

I didn’t know this at the time, but my grandmother was horrified that  
my parents went ahead with my trip after the accident. She told them  
they were sending a little girl to her death (I was just out of  
elementary school); and though my mother wept with guilt in secret,  
she protected me from their discord, determined that I have the  
experience I’d anticipated for two years, a reward for assiduous  
language study. That summer abroad was the single most formative  
experience of my young life. I can’t count the number of foreign and  
domestic flights I made in the ensuing two decades. Including, in  
1995, a KLM flight from Africa to America via Amsterdam — Mr.  
Abdulmutallab’s itinerary, more or less.

Since 9/11/2001, or since 12/22/2001 (when Richard Reid attempted to  
blow up a Boeing 767 between Paris and Miami by detonating his  
sneakers), how many grandmothers, how many parents, how many people of  
whatever age, sex, or familial connection, have avoided air travel out  
of fear, or cautioned their friends and relatives against it? The  
risks of air travel continue to be minuscule, even during the War on  
Terror era, while the advantages of exploring other countries remain  
precious and inarguable.

Still, a fortress mentality settles in each time a new instance of  
attempted airborne thuggery hits the airwaves. In the wake of alarming  
headlines, an obstacle course of cumbersome but laudable security  
precautions unrolls at airports, leading many of the earth’s seven- 
billion-odd inhabitants to resolve to remain earthbound as much as  
possible. One goal of terrorists is to make ordinary people afraid to  
leave their homes and interact with the wider world. Attacks on  
individual courage may leave no scars, but that does not mean they do  
no damage.

In this last decade, nobody can tally the number of flights not taken,  
adventures not dared, countries not visited, because of the public’s  
anxieties about air travel. In 2005, rebelling against my own fears of  
traveling to sections of the globe that had come to seem perilous, I  
booked a flight to Syria and Lebanon to visit journalist friends who  
were living there. Days before my flight left Kennedy Airport, Syria  
revealed it had halted military and intelligence cooperation with the  
United States. My adrenalin racing, I packed, in anticipation mingled  
with dread. In the waiting room at the plane’s gate, as I sat amid  
women in hijab and children with stuffed animals and pink backpacks, I  
took half an Ambien to dim my worries. My companion, meanwhile, was  
watching “24” on a laptop; and as Kiefer Sutherland blew away one Arab  
“bad guy” after another, a family moved a few seats away from us,  
because we were so scary.

I’m grateful that I overcame my cowardice and traveled to Damascus —  
the most fascinating, culturally diverse city I’ve ever visited — and  
to Baalbek, in Lebanon, which Alexander the Great called Heliopolis  
and which is now home to the ruins of great temples the Romans erected  
beginning in the first century B.C.

Baalbek, also a stronghold for Hezbollah, is admittedly not the most  
welcoming destination. All the same, how can such a monument go  
unseen? It’s hard to assess the cost of the sacrifices an uneasy  
populace makes to the great idol Safety — sacrifices that have no sure  
reward.

Steps are already being taken to shore up air security in the  
aftermath of last week’s breach. But when will the skies again be  
truly friendly? When will Americans again be free to be curious,  
flight-miles-earning world citizens? Maybe we already are — as long as  
we’re willing to get to the airport a few hours early to run the ever- 
lengthening security gauntlet. In 2010, potential dangers will attach  
to every flight, just as they did 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years  
ago and before. Does that mean everyone should just stay put? For more  
than three years, the Department of Homeland Security has ranked the  
threat risk of domestic and international flights at “Code Orange”—  
high. But staying in your own house still puts you at “Code Yellow” —  
elevated risk.

How, then, to proceed? Perhaps there’s only ever been one trick to  
keeping one’s cool in challenging circumstances, the same one the  
British adventurer T. E. Lawrence offers for dealing with pain in  
David Lean’s film “Lawrence of Arabia,” set a century ago, in another  
war. The trick, he says, “is not minding.”