This week, my boss & I went over the year’s conference schedule, to figure out who’s going where. As it turns out, due to a couple of local-ish shows and changes in our production schedules, I’m not going to have to do too much business-flying this year. It’s a nice change from the past 3 years, which saw plenty of work-flights and lots of Xanax-ingestion.
I can trace my air-anxiety to a takeoff to Phoenix in October 2003, where the first 90 seconds out of Newark were the most harrowing moments of my life. Since then, I’ve been a nervous flyer. Not in extreme “Get me off this plane!” ways, but I tend to take bumps pretty seriously. It’s silly, and I’m able to get over it sometimes by preoccupying myself with music (the louder and more techno-y, the better) or that aforementioned anti-anxiety drug.
I bring all this up because Donald at 2Blowhards has a great post about Scary Airports:
The airports I’ve flown into that make me nervous tend to be those in cramped locations. National Airport near Washington and New York’s LaGuardia are two examples. National is tucked next to the Potomac River and its main runway is about 6,900 feet long (and seemed shorter the last time I used it, 15+ years ago). La Guardia’s runways are about 150 feet longer, but the airport is boxed in by Long Island Sound. Unless you’re landing to the north (and waving at friends in the Shea Stadium parking lot), landing approaches are over water.
Personally, I don’t have a problem with coming in over water. Although I recall that a flight during my trip to Sweden & Denmark in 2004 allowed passengers to look through cameras on the plane’s exterior, as part of the in-flight entertainment. The approach over water (I think it was coming into Paris for the connection at CDG) was a little disturbing from nose-cam.
Anyway, give his post a read, and make sure to check out the comments, which are fantastic.
(Bonus: a YouTube video of planes landing at the incredibly wind-cursed Wellington airport in NZ!)
The runway in Florence (Italy) is so short and crammed between mountains that a jet can neither take off or land from it. You have to take a pond-hopper from Germany. Scares the ever-living shit out of you.