Daily Mail

HOW I CONQUERED MY FEAR OF FLYING by Sean Langan

Journalist and documentary-maker Sean Langan, 38, has flown to countries such as Colombia and Afghanistan for his work, but it wasn’t the dangers on the ground that concerned him, rather his irrational phobia of flying. So he tried a revolutionary treatment to conquer his fears, with remarkable success.

My fear of flying is not just a mild case, but a real white-knuckled, oh-my-God-I’m-going-to-die-any-second kind of fear. Which is unfortunate, because as a foreign journalist I can’t exactly stay at home.

My job has taken me to dangerous places such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Colombia, but I’m far more concerned by flying planes than flying bullets. You can get out of the way of a bullet, but you can’t get out of a plane at 30,000ft.

The thing is, I once loved flying. But the older I get, and the more often I fly, the worse my fear becomes.

When taking off, my palms start to sweat and my stomach tightens. Once in the air, I feel as though the plane is about to flip over. It got to the point earlier this year when I nearly decided to stop flying altogether.

My point of no return came in March. After a nasty experience on a small plane in Mexico, in which I’d taken off in poor conditions with a pilot in even worse condition - he was drunk and kept diving so I could look at the Mayan ruins below - I decided enough was enough.

I could do a Dennis Bergkamp (the Arsenal footballer who hates flying so much he takes the train when his side play in Europe), or I could try to overcome my fears.

Which is why, a few weeks ago, I agreed to take the flight to end all fears. But as I sat in the cockpit of the Boeing 727, the red warning lights and my life flashing before my eyes, I began to wish I’d followed Bergkamp and taken the train.

The plane veered almost vertically upwards before banking sharply to the left. To make matters worse, the cockpit was shuddering violently because of severe turbulence, and my stomach was doing loop-the-loops.

The captain, sensing my concern, took his hands off the steering column and turned to face me. “You see how safe it is,” he smiled. Great, I thought. I’ve got a mad pilot with a death wish. That’s all I need.

In fact, Captain Keith Godfrey had tailored the flight, or rather the terrifyingly realistic flight simulator, to my needs.

Other clients who board the Virtual Aviation simulator - the only one of its kind in Britain - need not fear.

In the two years they’ve been running the course at Heathrow, they’ve never put the plane through such extreme flying before. Apparently, they thought that was what would work best for me. And they were right.

By showing me just how far you can push a plane, and still keep it safely within its limits, they allayed my fears.

Other passengers experience nothing worse than a smooth cruise in perfect conditions. But I wanted to experience for myself just how far you can tip a plane before it falls out of the sky. And as I learned, you can toss it like a salad Nicoise and still land it safely.

That will come as good news to the estimated one in ten people with a fear of flying. But then, statistics and reason don’t come into it, and can fly, as it were, in the face of irrational fear.

I know all the so-called facts about the safety of air travel. According to statistics, you’d have to fly every day for 19,000 years to be involved in a serious incident. And then the chances of being injured are even less.

But then, just as millions of people believe they could win the Lottery against all the odds, every time I got on a plane I thought my number was up.

Which is why I physically had to experience things for myself before I was able to convince myself of the truth. That planes, by and large, do not fall out of the sky like rotten apples. No amount of pre-flight talk by the staff at Virtual Aviation could convince me otherwise.

They could have wheeled in Sir Isaac Newton himself and I would still have doubted him. But in their careful pre-flight questioning - akin to a session with a therapist - they homed in on what lay beneath my fear.

I was a little sceptical at first when Susie, my pre-flight therapist, said “to make progress, we have to break through”.

But the deeper she probed, the more I revealed. And eventually my inner worries surfaced. Like many fearful flyers, I often experienced a heightened sense of hearing, noticing subtle changes in engine noises and amplifying them dramatically in my mind.

But it also appears I suffered from a bizarre form of snobbery, feeling safer when a nice, stiff-upper-lipped English pilot’s voice came over the Tannoy rather than, say, a Mexican accent: “Hey Meester, we ‘ees cruising at a crazy altitude” - or even the slightly suburban estuary tones of your average easyJet pilot.

But Susie focused on my heightened sense of motion as the core issue. Banking was the worst, which is why Captain Keith Godfrey flipped the plane like a pancake.

It was an experience I would rather not go through again. But by facing my worst fear, I’d overcome it. And fellow sufferers will be glad to hear I got through my next real flight safe and sound.

Reproduced from the Daily Mail, 20th October 2003.