{"id":191,"date":"2006-01-15T00:42:02","date_gmt":"2006-01-15T00:42:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chekyang.com\/musings\/2006\/01\/i-wish-i-could-fly\/"},"modified":"2006-01-15T00:42:02","modified_gmt":"2006-01-15T00:42:02","slug":"i-wish-i-could-fly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2006\/01\/15\/i-wish-i-could-fly\/","title":{"rendered":"I wish I could fly"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"blog-can-you-fly.jpg\"No matter how many times I fly, I never feel comfortable onboard an airplane. When I\u2019m flying, I experience the whole range of emotions that run from \u201ca little terrified\u201d, \u201cterrified\u201d, to \u201cabsolutely terrified\u201d. Yeah, I know that flying is the safest mode of transportation known to man now, perhaps short of taking the escalator or lift, and I\u2019m more likely to lose a limb while driving than on a plane. Still, those statistics of safe flying can seem pretty meaningless when you read of yet another airplane accident.<\/p>\n

In order to circumvent those fears and stop it from turning into utter irrationality – e.g. I stop flying altogether – I picked up a book written for nervous flyers. There were many nuggets of wisdom in that tome, some of which I\u2019ll share here.<\/p>\n

I can smell gasoline! Is my plane burning up??<\/strong><\/p>\n

Fortunately, it\u2019s not. The gasoline fumes one smells while the plane is taxi-ing on the runway comes typically from the rear exhaust of the plane that just took off ahead of the plane you\u2019re on. Whew.<\/p>\n

The overhead lights just flickered! Did the pilot recharge the plane batteries??<\/strong><\/p>\n

He did, but those lights flickered not because of failing power. It flickered while the plane was getting ready to take off because it switched from drawing power from the airport to its own electrical generators.<\/p>\n

I just saw the left plane wing flex a little! Is the wing coming loose??<\/strong><\/p>\n

Those plane wings are intentionally designed to flex a little. It\u2019s pretty much the same concept when you feel some slight swaying when you\u2019re on the top most floor of a skyscraper on a windy day. If the wing was hard solid and couldn\u2019t flex, it could probably crack from the force exerted by oncoming winds when flying at subsonic speeds.<\/p>\n

Funnily, despite all these little pieces of information intended to reassure and comfort the nervous flyer, I still can\u2019t wait to get my feet back on solid ground whenever I\u2019m up in the air flying. I guess that makes me an extreme nutjob that no book or amount of flying will cure.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a joke that I used to crack with my lecture groups while teaching in Informatics<\/a> – that I\u2019d always sooner rather take a train or a boat than take an airplane. Why? Because if the train fails I can walk. If the boat sinks, I can swim. But if the airplane fails, I sure can\u2019t fly, can I?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No matter how many times I fly, I never feel comfortable onboard an airplane. When I\u2019m flying, I experience the whole range of emotions that run from \u201ca little terrified\u201d, \u201cterrified\u201d, to \u201cabsolutely terrified\u201d. Yeah, I know that flying is<\/p>\n

Read More I wish I could fly<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[644],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-everything-else","wpcat-644-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}