Air crash paranoia

I've travelled all over this big, bold and beautiful world of ours, and I'm still as shit-scared of flying as I ever was. It's not just the take-offs and landings with the mysterious bangs and bumps, or the turbulence with the sudden drops and rises, it's the sheer unreality of thinking about what's under your feet when you're cruising over the Pacific Ocean at 30-fucking-thousand feet.

I get over this by just sucking it up and getting on the goddamn plane like a grown-up, but I also find that Air Crash Investigations programmes do help a lot. 

They probably shouldn't, because they always start with everything going wrong, and masses of people being killed in horribly sudden ways. But once you get past that, you get a look at how planes actually work, and the massive amount of things that have to go wrong for an accident to happen. It's almost always a cascade of failures, and the investigation team always work to ensure don't happen twice.

Weird shit still happens, and these things do fall out of the sky on a terrifyingly regular basis. But along with all the statistics that show how safe it actually is, and the unlikelihood of ever dying in a crash, that's how I get back on the plane, and that's what I think of when it drops a 100 feet in 30 seconds during a thunderstorm. 

I just don't think about that first 10 minutes.