The Trouble With Flying

There is something about being fifteen thousand feet in the air, hidden in a metal cylindrical capsule and travelling at 500 miles an hour that just makes me, oh, I don’t know – a little uncomfortable.

I mean, I just don’t get it. It hasn’t registered. I know it has to be done if you want to enjoy any sort of decent vacation. Even I have to do it. There is no way I’m skipping up to Donegal for a week of wind. And by skipping I mean sitting in a car for 6 hours.

Anyway, the long and winding roads of the North West aside, while I cannot stand flying, I am fascinated by planes. I mean, they are an amazing achievement. As well as that, they are a perfect symbol of mankind’s stubbornness to accept them selves for what they are.

I can just picture the Wright Brothers looking at each other; refusing to give in to the limitations that evolution had cast us with. Making effort after effort to see if clouds were indeed made from the same stuff as Candy Floss.

Seriously though, I could sit there all day watching planes take off, planes land, planes in general. But put me in one and I become a wreck, a jabbering, portrait of patheticness, with very little resemblance to a grown man.

Except when we come in to land. Maybe, it ‘s the glorious site of land, and the fact that I am not plummeting towards it, maybe it’s realising my fear is unfounded. I don’t know.