It looked like an ordinary flight between Bucharest and London. The pilot announced the start of the descent and the plane immediately began to move. Strangely.
Not the way it moves in turbulence, but as if it were being pushed sideways by invisible forces. I was sitting by the window and I could see the right wing moving. Up, down, right, left. Wide movements. The people around me started to tense up. It smelled of fear.
The closer we got to the ground, the harder the plane moved left and right, as if it could not be stabilised. First there was a general murmur, then a few people started screaming. In the row in front of me, someone was already emptying their stomach into a bag.
But we only had a few metres left to the runway and I thought that one way or another, well or badly, it would soon be over.
I was wrong. It was only beginning.
Before the wheels touched the runway, the nose of the aircraft suddenly lifted, the engines fired and we were heading back up towards the sky.
People lost it. At this point you could hear crying from every direction. The woman on my left, an Arab woman, was staring at the seat back in front of her, shaking, praying out loud.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the pilot has just performed a go-around, a standard procedure in cases where conditions are not suitable for a safe landing. The wind gusts are too strong. We will climb and wait for instructions for another landing attempt.”
The words stayed with me: another attempt. An attempt. Another attempt. As in, maybe it works this time.
What followed was sixty minutes of circling above London waiting our turn to try to land, then another attempt at the same airport, which also failed, another go-around, the plane lifting again right before the wheels touched because it was rocking too much, and then a diversion to a different airport, where we would “attempt to land”.
All this time the tension in the plane was rising dramatically. Every announcement, every attempt made people more panicked and more desperate.
I could feel the anxiety rising in me too.
Tension in the solar plexus, the body going rigid, negative thoughts pouring into my mind like a tap someone had left running. Among them, the most nagging question of all: roughly how much reserve fuel does a plane carry? This flight has already taken nearly twice as long as it should have. How much longer can we stay up here?
I was doing things. I had been breathing in a controlled way for twenty minutes already, I was running the same film with a happy ending, the one where we are in the airport handing the border officer our passport, smiling.
But it felt as if all of that had already started not to be enough. Like swimming against a current. It was not yet pulling me out to sea, but I could feel that I could not sustain this pace for much longer. And panic was the last thing I needed. It never brings anything good.
And the woman praying and shaking in a state of shock to my left was not helping at all.
Somewhere between the first and the second landing attempt I turned towards her, held out my hand and, in the calmest voice I could manage at that point, said:
“Hello. I am Andrei. Glad to meet you.”
She stopped shaking, turned her head towards me with the confused eyes of a person who has just received what we in change strategy call a pattern interrupt, and after looking at me for three seconds as if I were mad, she answered, almost whispering.
“Amina. My name is Amina. This is not good, right? We have a problem.”
I ignored her question, smiled, probably a little forcedly, and carried on as if I had not heard it.
“What does it mean?”
“Uh?”
“What does your name mean? What does Amina mean?”
She told me that Amina means “truthful”. But that it also means “protected”. I carried on:
“Ah, protected. Well, that is a relief.”
We both started to laugh. That nervous, exaggerated laugh that is necessary in moments like those.
“What does yours mean?”
“Andrei? It means glad to meet you.”
She laughs.
“Come on, seriously?”
“Nope.”
We both laugh again. I add:
“It means I do not think we die today.”
She smiles. I smile too.
“Yes. Statistically, it is unlikely.”
“Exactly. Possible, but unlikely.”
Forty minutes later we managed to land at another London airport. The answer, by the way: a plane carries around two extra hours of fuel. Thank you to my mind for asking the question a hundred times. I had understood it the first time.
We get to border control and an officer smiles at me and asks:
“How was your flight, sir?”
“Let us just say I am very glad to see you.”
He tells me we were the only plane that managed to land there that day, the rest were diverted to other cities. I answer that we knew we had done well, but that we had also tried many times before succeeding.
He laughs. I laugh. The passenger behind me laughs too.
All of us with the same drawn out laugh, as if the joke had been at least three times better than it actually was.
I see Amina in a queue to my right, a few metres away. Headphones in, talking on the phone, but when we see each other she closes her hand into a fist and gives me a thumbs up that says “we are okay”.
I smile and answer the same way, take my passport, thank the border officer, and remember that I came to London for work, and that tomorrow I have a flight back.
I notice my mind making a note: check the weather before the flight. I imagine deleting it and replacing it with: today was a good day. Possibly one of the few days that could genuinely have been bad.
There. That looks better.
Internal control is the only one you really have
There are moments when things go wrong and we know we have no control. There are relatively few situations in which we are in a “plane” that someone else is flying. But they exist.
And in those moments, even when you are certain you have no control at all over the external environment, you usually still have control over what happens inside you.
And if sometimes, somehow, the things inside you also get out of control, you can look around you and find someone who needs help even more than you do. And in trying to help them, you might realise that you have helped yourself.
And that in fact you were not quite as devoid of control as you thought you were.
PS: I have a great deal of experience working one to one with fear of flying, which shows up in contexts far more relaxed than the one in this article. If you need to solve this, or you know someone who does, I am very glad to help. It usually takes only two sessions.
About the author
Andrei Roșca is a change strategist working one to one with founders, C level executives and senior managers who perform well on the outside while carrying a constant internal load. The work is nervous system regulation under real pressure, not motivation and not mindset. 13+ years of practice, 510+ clients, 8120+ individual sessions, through Whisper, Center for Strategic Change. Sessions are online, in English or in Romanian.
If this described your situation, start here: Coaching for overthinking executives. Or read more about my background and method.