Fear of Flying

I enjoy flying, but only if I can get a window seat. The difference in your perspecitve of the world can change a lot when you can cruise at 30,000 feet on a clear day, or when you can skim through the rolling hills and valleys of soft white clouds.

If you get bored, you can request a pair of headphones and listen to the flight crew as they jockey for position in the sky and request hand offs to new flight traffic controllers.

Otherwise, flying is pretty boring. I don't see it that risky, either. Human error aside, it takes a lot to bring a plane out of the sky. You can put a bullet hole through a window, and it will still fly. You can peel back 6 feet of the fuselage and it will still fly. You can lose an engine (sometimes even two) and it will still fly. You can lose the primary hydraulic system and it will still fly.

By contrast, I read about fatal car accidents in the local paper every day.

How ya doing, buddy?

Quote:

Can someone explain the lift off and the landing?

What do you mean by 'explain'?

Take-off is pretty strait-forward. Full trust until the pilot has enough airspeed, and then he pulls back gently on the stick. After gaining a bit of altitude and speed, the gears come up. After that its just a matter of climbing to cruising altitude, setting the autopilot, and then sitting back making sure nothing out of the ordinary is happening.

Landing is more involved. I pilot needs to get an approach vector, get clearance to land, and then starts the descent. You'll feel the plane slowing down and descending. As the aircraft gets slower, the pilot gives 1/4 flaps (flaps increase the lift that the wings generate). Slower still, the landing gear come down and the pilot gives 1/2 flaps. Before landing, the pilot will give full flaps and bring the nose up so that the plane can touch down on the rear wheels first. This whole time the pilot will also be making minor course corrections to line up with the runway. I imagine that while it might seem spectacular to a passenger, its not that hard with modern ILS system. A laser beam is projected out of the runway along a vector representing the perfect approach. All a pilot has to do is line up a horizontal and vertical bar on his instrument panel, keep the correct speed, and touchdown should be perfect. This isn't always the case, since headwinds, tailwinds, and crosswinds can affect the plane's approach. Once down, airbrakes and reverse thrust are used to slown the craft down quickly.

The worst thing you are likely to experience on a flight is wind sheer on landing. Wind sheer is a sudden burst of crosswind that stall a plane (disrupition of lift generated by the wings). For the unwary pilot, this can be a shock and he might end up dropping the craft on the runway like a giant sack of bricks. Wind sheer like that is reported by the tower upon approach, so pilots know what they are flying into.

There's nowhere I can't reach.