Fear of Flying

When I was young & foolish I did a couple of parachute jumps. The first one is the hardest.

The training takes two days before you are allowed to jump. And the instructors use the same technique employed by the army in the first world war. They shout a lot, telling you to do things which you don't want to do. Stand up, sit down, get in the door.... GO! So when they tell you to go over the top, you just do it. Your brain has stopped functioning. Your body just obeys their commands.

Then you board the aircraft. As I recall there were about 15 of us. I was number eight which was perfect. You don't want to be the first or the last. They tell you to stand up, you stand. They tell you to "get in the door", you get in the door. They tell you to GO... and you jump. Into nothing but thin air, relying on a big piece of cloth to save you from plunging to your certain death. It's great fun.

But there is one drawback. The next time you board a commercial flight you don't have a parachute. Instead you have a life-jacket with a bleeding whistle. That might be reassuring when you are crossing the Pacific or Atlantic. But when you are flying to Almaty from Moscow, over thousands of miles of hard land, & only the shrinking sea of Aral to splash into... it's hardly comforting.