Fear of Flying

I would suggest he watch the Outer Limits episode where William Shatner tries to convince the stewardess there's a troll sitting on the wing of the airplane.

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That was eerie. I think I got Outer Limits mixed up with Twil. Zone

LOL...you did panzade. :wink:

Airlines/airports are offering special seminars here for such persons with great success.

I know one person with fear of flight: she crashed with her airplane nearly 40 years ago: more than 80 persons died, just a dozen survived.
She's flying - but actually prefers trains, when it is possible.

In my experience, dreams are rarely so blatantly obvious in their meaning. It's more probable that his true fear is something like a lack of security, he may have an underlying terror of things just "dropping out from under him". Was he a child of divorce, or did he experience some other unexpected trauma like that (keep in mind this isn't a professional opinion, just what I've gathered over the years).

lots of people are afraid of heights. Me, I'm afraid of widths. I heard somebody say that, I think it was over in London town or maybe it was in Paris Texas. Mostly I'm afraid of grocery store parking lots when little ole blue haired ladies drive their fathers Oldsmobiles at crazy oblique angles with bags of Attends in the back seats and apricots scattered about on the floorboard rolling between the gas and the brake pedals, Yikes, when that happens I just go into the Starbucks and sip on a Gingerale until the whistle blows the all clear.

Years ago, a friend told me a story. HER friend, was a young woman who had flown back and forth many times while she was in college in the late 1950's. Now she was married, had kids, and was going on vacation with her husband.(grandma was taking care of the kids)

My gf and her husband took the couple to the airport. They had a drink together. The woman raised her glass and said, "Drink to me, I am not coming back".

The plane crashed.

I don't know if you can remember this, but years ago, buying plane insurance was very common. You could buy it right in the airport. In fact, ANYBODY could buy the insurance for someone going on a flight.

Well, this turned out to be a famous case. It seems that a man had bought insurance for , I think, his mother in law, and then put a bomb on the plane. After that incident, only people who were actually flying could buy insurance for themselves.

Come to think of it, maybe I haven't been looking, but I have not seen those insurance stands in a long, long time!

Oh, as for your friend. Give him a couple of Valium. If his flight is imminent, I doubt whether behavioral conditioning could do much in such a short time.

My friend is deathly afraid of flying. Whenever he has leave (time off) and no matter how much of an emergency it is, he will drive.

Even talking about it, makes him go bonkers.

This is a tough, I'm above all, type of guy too.

When being sent to Iraq, the doctor just gave him some pills that make him fall asleep. He's used them before, and says he can't get on w/o them. Takes it an hour before the flight takes off.

Phoenix, when I was 18 I booked a flight from London to NY on Caledonian Airways which was a charter flight company for retired Scots. The plane took off and it was filled with elderly tourists. When the screen came down for the inflight movie I was shocked to see the title was "Those Magnificent Men In Their Fying Machines". One old codger promptly had a heart attack and we returned to Glasgow I believe. I spent the night sleeping in the airport. Talk about insensitivity.

I fly home ( to visit mom and dad) about three times a year, and have for about seven years. It used to be that I would never think about it, I would be relaxed the entire time.

These days, I've made the mistake of thinking about what is actually taking place as I am flying. I mean, I will sit and think about how I am shooting through the air, tens of thousands of feet above the earth, in a tiny metal capsule. On the most recent flight I was on, I remembered a carnival ride I was on about a month before, a sort of ferris wheel in which you sit in a cage that spins upsidedown as the wheel itself spins, I remembered thinking on that ride, listening to the screams of others and being jerked around, contemplating the total chaos of it all, that this is what a plane crash must be like.

They say travelling by plane is safer than by auto. Well, as your plane is plummeting, you have time--seconds that likely last an eternity--to contemplate your death and panic. In a car, YOU have a certain amount of control over your destiny, or your friend does, whoever is driving.

So I have developed a hobby of drinking bloody marys in airport bars--partly due to nerves, partly due to fascination with the airport bar crowd.

There is a solution to it all: don't think about it so much.

Interesting Garg.I have a tendency to suck down Cuba Libre's in the airport bar and snore all the way to Vancouver. I must be medicating myself.

Doglover
Doglover, tell you friend the only passenger whose fate is of importance is that of the plane's pilot. If his time is not up, your friend's isn't either.

BBB

I think I know the ride you're talking about, Gargamel. It's set on a sort of giant tank tread that rotates and spins on a central axis. I love that ride.

I also love flying, when I start to think about what I'm actually doing, I love it even more.

I flew for the first time in my life right after 9/11. I was expecting to be terrified, but didn't have one moment of anxiety. Odd, no?

Actually, Panz and doglover, It was John Lithgow in Twilight Zone the movie. Hee Hee! Memory cells still working. Hmmm. Maybe there was an episode with William Shatner, though. Easy for me to get confused about stuff like that.

I remember WIlliam Shatner: "There's something on the wing! Some-THING on the wing!"

Never mind Fortune. I'm sure lithgow brought a crude sense of terror to the role.

How dare he!

I approach flying the same as you do Gargamel. I love taking off...looking down at the earth and soaring up into the clouds. But once I'm about seven miles above the earth, I cannot let my mind think about it. I read, engage in conversation with my traveling companion, watch the movie, eat or drink. Anything that will keep me distracted from acknowledging how high I am above the earth.

As for my friend, he was a child of divorce. His mom died of cancer when he was 13 and his dad didn't want him so he lived in a group home until he ran away at 17. As an adult, he has accomplished a lot with his life and turned out very well considering the difficult childhood he had. I know that he is a strong, determined individual and he will be fine on Sunday when his plane takes off. I was looking for some magic words I could tell him to ease his (what I consider irrational) fears about crashing.

BBB...wise words from you that I will pass along to him. Thank you.

My friend won't take a drug like Valium or drink alcohol the morning of the flight.