Late this afternoon someone called to tell us Alaska Airlines flight 261 had gone down off the Los Angeles coastline. The office went silent as all of us mentally reviewed our clientele list: was anyone we knew returning from Puerto Vallarta today? No. Thank god. Someone quickly ran a search to double check passenger name records with those air segments. I jumped onto the Internet to find a news site while the assistant manager turned on the radio. My jaw clenched, and my throat grew tight as the news trickled in. Mechanical trouble. The plane hit the water, floated upside down for five minutes, then sank. No survivors. An MD-80. We knew the equipment, knew if it was full there would be 130 passengers. Would have been.
No survivors.
The office was in a sombre mood the rest of the afternoon. We all fly so much, most of us getting out of town for a quick weekend once a month, many of us choosing the Alaska nonstops to Mexico. This time, it wasn't anyone we sold a ticket to. This time. Thank god. I've never lost a client to a plane crash. Every time one goes down I hold my breath, mentally reviewing, frozen with horror until I'm sure. I'm still bothered by the memory of certain air crashes that have occured during my years as a travel agent. I'd traveled on the Pan Am jet that was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland. The Maid of the Sea, on the long haul route from London to San Francisco, gone in an instant. It could have been me.
Crashing in a plane is one of my deepest fears. I'm simply terrified by the idea of plunging to my death and knowing I'm not going to survive. I'm particularly terrified of drowning, afraid of deep water. Yet I fly year round, and I love the ocean. It's only when the unthinkable happens that I let that fear weaken me into tears and shaking hands. There were 88 people on the plane, all from Seattle and San Francisco. It could have been a friend. It could have been a client.
There have been many times when I've nearly chickened out from taking a flight, suddenly seized with an unreasonable conviction that the plane will fall out of the sky and kill me. I've sat rigid and panicked through more flights than I can name, nearly fainting with fear every time we hit a patch of air turbulence. I started flying when I was twelve years old. I didn't conquer my fear of flying until I was twenty nine. You know what finally did it? My trip to Australia. By the time I got through a 17 hour flight there and a 15 hour flight back plus flitting about the continent I was good and bored. Turbulence? Like bumps in the road. Vertigo? Nah, looking out the window is like watching a National Geographic special. I'm over it. But I'm not complacent. When I get on a plane and find my seat, the first thing I do is note where the closest emergency exit is, and count the number of rows between me and it so I can find it even if the lights are out and there's smoke in the cabin. Morbid, but it may save my life someday. I hope I never have to use the information.
Travel agents are familiar with delays, missed flights, misconnections, duplicate reservations, oversold flights, the havoc bad weather creates on the nation's air schedule. We deal in frustration and arcane rules. What we don't talk about is the spectre of death. There are plenty of statistics that will raise the hair on the back of your neck and give you nightmares, of course, if you read up on the near misses, and overworked traffic controllers making mistakes, and equipment failures, and lack of maintenance which plague the air carriers. Nonetheless, airline travel is actually quite safe. Crashes are rare, and pilots don't come close to the percentages of mistakes people make driving their cars around town. I don't hesitate to take a plane rather than a train or a car; I value the speed of air flight, and the truth is I've come to love flying.
Once in a while, though, I remember how dangerous it is. And then my hands shake, and my mind races through lists, and I hold my breath thinking how easily it could have been me.
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