flight sketch
Role:
Date: October 5th, 2006
I really don’t enjoy flying, unfortunately. Usually it’s take off and landing, the bit in-between is OK. However this has not always been the case, I have clocked up well over 200 hours in the air – on everything from Jumbo Jets to small passenger light aircraft. My nerves come from an incident that happened in 2003. I was on a 747 coming in to land in Amsterdam from Tokyo. It was a long flight, I guess everyone was looking forward to the descent. The seat-belt sign came on as we hit some turbulence, most people returned to their seats, I feel sorry for the ones that didn’t as moments later we hit an area of what some call an “air pocket” (although it’s disputed what to call them). I have no idea how far the plane descended in those few seconds, with the entire plane’s occupants screaming it was hard to tell what was going on. I guess it was a close one, any lower and we might have been at risk of landing strangely.
So ever since I’m convinced we’ll burst into flames on take-off or the engines will fall off or something equally daft.
Flying to Okinawa gave me a bout of the nerves, which I dampened somewhat with several shots of whiskey at the airport (and customs rather embarrassingly sniffing my whiskey hip-flask that I forgot I had). It didn’t really do the job, just a waste of a few thousand yen. On the return flight I drank four beers, that really did do the job, totally took the edge off the nerves.
Also I found sketching seemed to take my mind of the whole flying fiasco, one of the sketches I made. Not sure what it is.
My opinion of flying has changed somewhat, now I’m rather at ease with it. Just have to remember that these planes cost millions of dollars, the pilots hardly want to die and planes fly all the time, without incident.
from http://www.planecrashinfo.com/