Nervous Flyers may say, ‘Enough already’

A lot of passengers are reassured when they hear the captain’s voice, especially if he sounds avuncular. The true Nervous Flyer knows it’s only a recording. Nobody’s up there.

These are great days for us sweatypalmed Nervous Flyers. Not only are the summer skies filled with bumpertobumper superjets, making every takeoff an adventure and every landing a crisis, there is the very real threat of winding up on the other side of the world, in enemy hands. It was a shock to see armed guards patrolling pretty, flowerstrewn Nice airport. At the handsome new Geneva airport, troopers were carrying mean looking submachine guns. Then there’s the business of examining your hand luggage and running a metal detector over the old bod — ineffectual devices but mildly reassuring. The only way to do it is the way the Israelis do it: bodysearch every passenger, examine every piece of luggage.

Jets have taken some of the fun out of being a Nervous Flyer. In the prop jet era, you could sit for hours at a window, enthralled by the oil dripping past a loose rivet on an inboard engine. Much more exciting than a movie. It was then apropos to make a bet with your seatmate on when the engine would catch fire. Also, on the old planes, you could see when the pilot feathered an engine (you never know when a jet has gone out). If you happened to be aboard a twinengine plane, like a C47, it was characterbuilding to realize you were down to one and entitled to another drink, perhaps your last. On night flights, there were all those sparks to watch.

On jets, there are other things to worry about. Like when the stewardess says that if there’s trouble with the cabin pressure, “an oxygen mask will drop down from the receptacle overhead.” No way. You KNOW there’s no oxymask up there. Maybe a moth or two, but no mask. The only one on the plane is the one she’s holding. Same with the life jacket, with the complicated straps that go this way, or maybe the other way, after which you pull down those two tabs but not till you’ve cleared the airspace because …

I don’t even listen any more. With my sweaty palms and all, I’d probably inflate it before I got it on backwards anyway. “Your life jacket is under your seat,” she always concludes, but I refuse to look. I’m almost sure it isn’t there … Oh, there it is. Way back there, jammed into a corner. Probably doesn’t work anyway.

A lot of passengers are reassured when they hear the captain’s voice, especially if he sounds avuncular. The true Nervous Flyer knows it’s only a recording. Nobody’s up there. The plane is operated by remote control from the Geneva tower, where at this very moment masked and armed men are about to pounce on the controller and …

However, I’m not the Nervous Flyer I used to be, except deep down inside. That’s because my wife is 10 times as nervous as I am. Poor shedevil. On takeoffs, she goes into a catatonic trance, eyes empty and lost. When the seat belt sign goes off it’s as though a hypnotist had snapped his fingers: she comes back to us. On landings, she grabs my leg in a powerful and sweaty grip. As I may have said before, I never get off a plane with a crease. To counteract her nervousness, I act sort of cool and masterful, like Charlton Heston, murmuring “There there” once in a while. Too bad I don’t have the face for it.

Since I trust the Swiss implicitly in all matters having to do with money, cheese, chocolate and aircraft, it was time to relax and enjoy it: the beautiful white plane, with the big red cross on the tail, took off like — what was that awful phrase? — Oh, yes — “like a homesick angel,” if you can imagine an angel making all those grinding noises that are characteristic of angels. The cabin crew wheeled out an airborne feast to shame all the chefs on the French Line: beautiful chilled fresh lobster and half a dozen other hors d’oeuvres equally good, three entrees (I chose the veal smothered in a sauce thick with morel mushrooms), a refreshing salad, a dozen cheeses and a crowning concoction of strawberries and whipped cream that was all the things you want a dessert to be — illegal, immoral, and fattening … A threestar meal and the passengers applauded the cabin crew.

On the New YorkSan Francisco run, dear old American Airlines was equal to Swissair’s challenge, even oneupping the opposition with hamburgers and Monte Cristo sandwiches, if you so desired. Captains Ray and Roger were at the controls, Robert Redford was on the screen, those beautiful stewardesses were slipping me ’burgers, fries and shakes and I wouldn’t have minded if time and the 747 had decided to stand still. Unfortunately, standing is still no characteristic of that aircraft.

This column originally appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle June 7, 1973.