ce n'est pas genève

BEFRIENDING THE BEAST: An Essay on Airplane Anxiety 

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As a child, I was a frequent flyer. I have vivid and beautiful memories of airports and airplanes, of the views beyond the window, of the wonder and incredulity that filled my young mind as I gazed at expansive oceans and sun-kissed clouds. Nothing, however, compares to my first memories of the cockpit. I remember my parents walking my two siblings and I to the front of the plane, where we would meet the pilots and stare open-mouthed at the maze of glowing buttons and knobs that guided us through the clouds. The pilots were always kind and friendly and, to my six-year-old self, never appeared to be doing much. The plane coasted just above the clouds with nothing but sky before her. Sometimes the sun was setting; sometimes we peered into inky black nothingness, enveloped by the silence. My siblings and I would grip my mother's hand or clutch my father's leg, solemn and starry-eyed, filled with a sense of calm and beauty, almost as if we were in the presence of God himself. I was never scared to fly. I loved the sky, and I greeted the airplanes I entered like old friends. 

After 9/11, this all changed. My siblings and I were no longer taken to visit the cockpits, and we were no longer afforded the luxuries we'd had as toddlers in matching outfits. Our morning journeys through the airport became hectic and tense, our parents arguing in the car and both of them having to unpack their laptops at the metal detector. Liquids were disposed by airport security; our carry-ons were searched thoroughly. Even my remote-control dogs, all five of which I walked religiously on pink plastic leashes, were handled with suspicion. "Wires," a burly security guard would murmur to his counterpart. "Batteries. Run it through again." And there Valerie, my plastic Dalmatian, would regrettably go, laid down again on the black rubber treadmill and stopped under the glare of the x-ray. I would wait with my heart in my throat, worried that my beloved dogs would be confiscated like my brother's toy blue cap guns had the summer before.

The tension that infiltrated the airports carried onto the plane. I had flown comfortably since I was born, but suddenly I was scared. Perhaps it was the images I'd seen as a sixth-grader, watching the planes crash into the twin towers. The images were everywhere. I saw them on magazines and in newspapers, on television programs and commercials, and it was all anyone talked about at school and at home. Movies, too, contributed to my newfound anxiety. I'd watched Bounce the year before, in 2000, a film starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Ben Affleck, and a fatal plane crash. Coincidentally, it was another Ben Affleck film, Pearl Harbor, that furthered my fears when I watched it in the spring of 2001. Final Destination in 2000, Cast Away in the same year, and even the fantasy scene in Fight Club all increased my anxiety, ending my friendly relationship with airplanes and obliterating the trust I'd had in flying. 

I began praying. I shook. I cried and begged my parents not to take me with them. I had nightmares over and over again, waking in a cold sweat in the middle of the night in the days before a looming flight. I dreamt of crashing on land, in water, spiralling into cities. I dreamt of looking out the plane's window and seeing the wing come ripping off. I thought of Aaliyah, the R&B songstress who had been killed in a plane crash in August, 2001. I thought of Ben Affleck in Bounce, and manipulated Titanic to  suit my fears, picturing surviving a crash into the ocean only to be eaten by sharks or freeze to death as I kicked and kicked with no one to save me. 

My parents were perplexed. They understood that the monolith of 9/11 had struck fear into every passenger, old and young alike. But what to do about a daughter who was suddenly having wildly dramatic panic attacks at the thought of every flight? We had to fly. I was eleven, twelve, and far too young to be left at home alone for two months at a time. My father told me to face my fears, trying to reason with me. Ironically my father is an aerospace engineer, and understands the mechanics of flight far better than the average person. He attempted to explain basic aerodynamic principles to me, trying to illustrate how safe flights really are. He tried to explain that 9/11 meant flights were safer now than ever, that airlines had beefed up security and that it was nearly impossible for potential hijackers to accomplish what the terrorists of 9/11 had. He tried to explain statistics and probability, his mathematic mind laying out a rational argument supported by hard facts and evidence. When all else failed, he gently told me that there is no escaping death. That it will come eventually, and that avoiding life and all its risk will not make me immortal. 
I wouldn't listen. I couldn't listen. I was petrified, and my fear lasted a long time. It was difficult to reconcile my love of travel with the onslaught of anxiety and fear that paralyzed me at the first sight of airports and airplanes. My eventual strategy was simple and strange. I don't remember the first time I did it, but at some point I did, and continue to do so today. I laid a hand on the outside of the plane as I boarded. I laid my hand on it as I would a horse's neck, as one pets a dog, or as my parents would affectionately pat me on the shoulder or the top of the head. In the second I had between the ramp and the plane, I laid my hand on the cool white exterior and spoke to the plane in my head, asking it to keep my family and I safe. I thought that maybe it was scared, too. In my mind, I transformed it from J.K. Rowling's Voldemort to Azlan, the noble lion from The Chronicles of Narnia. The plane was no longer foe but friend. 

Eminent feminist scholar Dr. Carol Cohn explains the psychological foundation behind my childhood strategy. In a seminar on International Relations I took this year, I read a paper by Dr. Cohn titled "Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defence Intellectuals" (1987) and immediately thought of my airplane anxiety strategy which, by now, has become an unconscious habit, a ritual I perform every time I board a plane. Cohn explains her discovery of a phenomenon she terms "patting the missile." Cohn visited the New London Navy base where nuclear submarines are homeported, taking a tour of a nuclear powered submarine with a group of other scholars and researchers. "When we reached the part of the sub where the missiles are housed, the officer accompanying us turned with a grin and asked if we wanted to stick our hands through a hole to 'pat the missile.' Pat the missile? The image reappeared the next week, when a lecturer scornfully declared that the only real reason for deploying cruise and Pershing I1 missiles in Western Europe was "so that our allies can pat them." Some months later, another group of us went to be briefed at NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defence Command). On the way back, our plane went to refuel at Offut Air Force Base, the Strategic Air Command head- quarters near Omaha, Nebraska. When word leaked out that our landing would be delayed because the new B-1 bomber was in the area, the plane became charged with a tangible excitement that built as we flew in our holding pattern, people craning their necks to try to catch a glimpse of the B-1 in the skies, and climaxed as we touched down on the runway and hurtled past it. Later, when I returned to the Center I encountered a man who, unable to go on the trip, said to me enviously, 'I hear you got to pat a B-1.'"Cohn's analysis implicates Freudian concepts of sexual possession and phallic obsession. She argues that "patting" such highly destructive and phallic-shaped objects is "an assertion of intimacy, sexual possession, affectionate domination. The thrill and pleasure of 'patting the missile' is the proximity of all that phallic power, the possibility of vicariously appropriating it as one's own." Having been raised by an aerospace engineer, I disagree that there are any sexual implications behind the 'phallic' shape of airplanes, rockets and missiles. I think its shape is based purely on science and aerodynamics. Thus I don't agree that my patting of the airplane has its roots in sexual possession; I do think, however, that an assertion of intimacy and perhaps some sort of domination is an appropriate analysis. In patting the airplane before I board, I am creating a physical bond of trust and intimacy. What about domination? Is patting an implicit act of domination? Cohn addresses the dual nature of patting and the non-sexual alternative, adding, "Patting is not only an act of sexual intimacy. It is also what one does to babies, small children, the pet dog. One pats that which is small, cute, and harmless - not terrifyingly destructive. Pat it, and its lethality disappears." I am thus consciously trying to minimize the potentially fatal consequences of boarding the plane. I am trying to psychologically deny the danger of the plane. 

When I lay my hand on the outside of an airplane, I think of the imprint of my palm rocketing through the sky at altitudes I will never feel. Inside the plane, I am in a warm cocoon, eating packaged sandwiches and watching Hollywood movies, smiling at flight attendants and making small talk with the other passengers. But the imprint of my palm is on the outside of the plane, facing sleet and snow and frigid temperatures. In a sense, I feel my hand calming the plane, guiding it, keeping it safe, riding with it as it tears through the sky. I think of the plane as I would a military horse in World War I - loyal, noble, strong, a brave being wanting nothing more than to deliver his cargo safely to the other side. It is the plane that protects us, and I the plane. Perhaps my strategy has implications deeper and more psychoanalytic than I understand. All I know, as I gaze out the window at the vast ocean below me, is that in patting the plane, I have befriended the beast. 

Written by Genevieve Zingg, May 18th 2013