goofyernmost
Aged to Perfection
- Joined
- Oct 8, 2002
- Messages
- 10,415
Honestly, I have nothing but sympathy for people that just can't force themselves to try and overcome the fears that they have. I hope that didn't sound nasty because I didn't intend it to be that. we all have our limitations, but, the sights I have seen and the places I have been, the experiences that I have been able to experience all have made that effort worth while. To be honest, when I get on a plane the first thing I think to myself is, sure hope the plane don't crash. So far it never has, but, it doesn't mean that I don't occasionally feel a little anxiety about it. It just no longer is strong enough to stop me and I'm always glad I kept pushing.
I don't recommend the following for some very obvious reasons, but, here is an experience that I had, that wasn't really pleasant, but, due to the fact that I stayed calm and just figured that I really didn't have a lot of choice, turned out to be a major memory in my life. I had flown a lot of miles before I had to fly from the east coast to Vietnam via a short stop of a few days for training in California. I spent my year in Vietnam and was flying home. All kinds of thoughts go through your head when that situation occurs. Here I spent a year in a war zone and was coming home with no physical damage at all. We board a stretch DC-8, to old for commercial use, but, just fine to shuttle military personnel. We laboriously took off from Bien Hoa, AFB, in S. Vietnam fully loaded with GI's, and every article of clothing and personal possessions on board. It took the entire 2 mile long runway to get airborne and we were still flying very low over what was still an active war zone. We obviously made it then moved on to Tokyo to refuel. We were suppose to fly to Anchorage then down to Seattle before heading across the states to New Jersey.
About two hours out over the Pacific, the pilot came on and made the following announcement. "We are currently experiencing a very strong tail wind and if that continues we should be able to skip Anchorage and go straight to Seattle. I don't know who else notice the words "if that continues", but, I did and my first thought was, what if it doesn't continue? There really is no history of being able to pull a DC 8 over to the curb and wait for AAA to send a truck with a 5 gallon container of jet fuel.
I'm guessing that we probably made our landing on fumes, but, land we did. Here was the interesting part. We had taken off from Vietnam at 2 pm Wednesday flew to Japan then across the Pacific (over the international date line) and arrived in Seattle at 1:55 pm that same Wednesday. We arrived in Seattle 5 minutes before we took off from Vietnam. Gotta love that type of experience when all goes well.
I still prefer driving over flying, not because of any fear, but, because of the endless amount of things that you can bring with you when you are driving that you can't do unless you own the plane. Also if the distance is right one can also save a lot of money driving, you might lose a little bit of time at your destination, but, to me it doesn't matter because I love me a road trip.
Sorry, for how long this turned out to be. I am a man of a lot of words.
Very few of them of any value.
