Fear of flying

By Myra Sidharta

JAKARTA (JP): There is good news for people suffering from fear of flying. Prof. Ren Diekstra from the University of Leyden, the Netherlands, says that it can be cured. In fact the success rate reported from cases treated in his clinic is 96 percent.

For some people it is similar to a phobia, a kind of irrational fear such as hydrophobia (fear of water), agoraphobia (fear of open places), claustrophobia (fear of enclosed spaces). For others the fear is acquired after some bad experience, and usually becomes manifest during a period of stress.

I myself became afraid of flying because as a little girl, my father once came home with a partially burned parcel and an envelope. They were burned in the 1930s in a plane called the Uiver, which had caught fire during a flight between Holland and Indonesia. Some of the mail had been saved and my father kept the envelope in a box and said that it would be worth a lot of money. But for me the fear of flying started and has not left me ever since.

At that time air travel was not very widespread yet and took a long time. A plane trip from Singapore to Jakarta, now a short one-and-a-half-hour flight, took up one whole day 50 years ago. It was considered short, because to fly to Amsterdam was a five- day-trip with stopovers in Bangkok, India and Cairo. One could say that in those days, a journey by plane could be compared to the luxury ship cruises of today.

When finally plane trips became affordable, passengers were required to go through several vaccinations, for diphtheria, cholera, typhoid fever and what not. A few days before the journey most prospective passengers became ill because the vaccinations usually causes fever and sore throats. I always became so scared, just by imagining that one could be infected by one of those terrible diseases on what was supposed to be a pleasure trip.

When finally these vaccinations were no longer a requirement, something new, even more frightening, came up: hijacking and bomb scares. Before boarding a plane the luggage has to be X-rayed, sometimes even a body search is conducted, nail cutters are considered weapons and are confiscated. Yet hijackers still often succeed in keeping the whole world in suspense with their threats and demands.

Once I had just boarded a plane in Frankfurt, when all the passengers were requested to identify their luggage. The airport authorities had received a phone call saying that somebody had checked in a suitcase containing a bomb. The panic caused by that simple announcement, given in a calm manner, was unbelievable. Everybody rushed out, afraid that the bomb might explode at that very moment. It needs no explanation that this incident increased my fear rather than diminishing it. What would have happened if the phone call had not been made? Or if the line had been busy and the caller had been unable to get through?

Another incident that added to my fear was a trip from Hong Kong to Guangzhou, a 40-minute flight in a rusty little plane assembled from parts from all over the world. It was evening and there was strong turbulence. The plane was shaking like a little boat in the ocean. Noticing my anxiety a young man next to me said reassuringly: "Don't worry, every time I go to China, my mother goes to the temple to burn a few joss-sticks and pray for me."

Of course, I felt safe on that trip, because his gods must have been protecting me as well. But I can't have them all activated whenever I am flying.

I was lucky on my last trip from the U.S. to Europe to sit next to little Charisma, an Afro-American girl. It was actually by accident that we came to sit next to each other.

At first there was a hassle about seats, because the flight was overbooked. When finally all the passengers were seated, my neighbor turned out to be a man, who by my estimate, weighed about 200 kilos. He settled in nicely, pushing me into the very corner of my window seat, because his arms came over my armrest. I sat quietly, trying to figure out how to climb over his big legs when I had to get out. And all the while my fear increased, because I was thinking what might happen when there was a turbulence that sent people up to the roof, like the case of the United States presidential plane.

Just before take-off his son, who together with the man's three other children were occupying the four middle seats, started to cry, because he wanted to sit with his father. And then I got the bright idea to suggest he should change seats with one of his daughters, so the son would stop crying.

They changed seats quickly, and I found myself relieved, because the little girl occupied not even half the space her father had. She slept soundly all night through, sucking her thumb while pulling the braids in her hair. In the morning I asked her if she wanted to look out of the window. She did and then asked me what the white things underneath the plane were.

"Those are the clouds," I told her.

"Clouds?" she asked me, looking at me with her big round black eyes, "Real clouds? You mean we are above the clouds?"

She looked again and then asked again: "You mean we're flying in a plane? I thought we were driving to see grandma in a car."

After my confirmation, she became excited and called her two sisters and one little brother: "You know what, we are in the sky now, on top of the clouds, come and look!"

They all came, crawling over me, to get a glimpse of the sky, the sun and the clouds. After that they became excited and wondered what was happening to them....

I suddenly felt silly with all my fears about fire, hijackers or bombs. On the next stretch I pretended to be a little girl driving in a car to visit my grandmother in Nigeria. It really worked! I abandoned my intention to go to Leyden for treatment, but I did buy the book published by Prof. Diekstra's institution on how to deal with fear for flying. Chances are that the fear may come back again, after all, as I am writing this article I hear another "tragedy in the sky" has happened.