How had I ended up back there? That the world was out to get us, that it was usually best to stay home, was the posture of our parents. I’d resented and rebelled against it, but then my brother’s own blood turned on him. My prudent brother who treated his body like a temple. His death was confirmation that we can’t keep safe. I had a child and wanted her to fly in every sense, but when she was a baby I’d recurrently dream that she morphed into him in my arms, and I knew in those dreams what would happen, knew that I couldn’t rescue him, and I’d wake up afraid to let my husband bike with our daughter to the park. Afraid to fly with her to Oslo, to Lisbon, to Nice. I did it. But it felt just like child endangerment. And while I couldn’t inflame about this just then (too tear-soggy), I promised the psychologist, who is also an Air France flight attendant, that I’d be very, very angry later.
“We can’t fix the phobia,” she said gently. “But the information you’ll receive in the course can pull air travel back to a neutral place.”
On a recent Friday the 13th, I reported to the training center. I arrived way too early. Early enough to breakfast with the two aviophobes in the class ahead of mine. The older woman, a photographer, wanted to travel to East Africa to see giraffes. The younger woman, an architect, didn’t want to ruin another far-flung holiday for herself and her friends. Over coffee and croissants, they revealed that difficulties in their personal lives had rewired planes into hell on wings, too.
It was an info-rich half-day. (One that included a business-class lunch. I had the duck.) My peer was a guy whose fear dated back to a bumpy flight. We considered our different profiles and how stress is accumulative; we heard about the comms between the crew and cockpit, and the annual training and checkups that flight attendants undergo (bless them). But the captain’s lecture and running of scenarios afterward in an Airbus A220 simulator was, for me, in the copilot’s chair, a coup de théâtre. After various troubles (engine surge! severe turbulence! go-arounds!), we virtually touched down on a sea- and mountain-girt tarmac. It was a foggy night in Nice.
This December, my almost 4-year-old and I flew Paris-to-Raleigh with Air France on my first plane ride since the workshop. I’d been anxious about it. Unsure of how much the experience had actually helped, I wasn’t about to test myself sans Xanax. But we boarded, and I wasn’t on edge. And we buckled in, and I still wasn’t. And we took off, and I didn’t luv it, but I was fine. I was fine the whole time.
Air France’s workshop graduates have the option to request that they be flagged on individual future Air France flights, so that attendants can come by and reassure us. That helped, and it helped that the air was ultra smooth, and that such facts as the air wouldn’t possibly play rough enough with a wing to break it had been impressed upon me. I have, moreover, on the recommendation of the Air France psychologist, been seeing a psychologist to talk through other impressive facts, like the metaphysics of grief. It’s a universal law. Baggage is meant to be unpacked.
