Filed December 1, 2025
AFRAID TO FLY
Afraid to Fly — More of a Flight Log Than a Field Note. (Click image or here to watch video)
Not exactly a Dispatch From The Margins. I get it. We’re going off script here for just a minute.
This dispatch comes from Willie. I’ve had it in the archive a while. a necessary thread in the tapestry as a whole about surviving the ordinary so he could share the unusual.
Willie, who, as some of you may know from the book, carries a lifelong, debilitating, nearly unmanageable fear of flying. The kind that makes a grown man demand to be let off a plane in Hawaii while it’s still inching away from the gate. Yep, that actually happened.
So when he booked a flight to Japan for what he called his “last pilgrimage,” I asked him to try — really try — to capture the experience as best he could.
Most of the footage didn’t make the cut. Blurry video of the cabin ceiling (or floor), there was a particularly long segment of what looked like the inside of his pocket. But the short piece attached to this blog, a little glimpse of what he saw from each leg of the trip, did.
What mattered more than the video was what happened after the trip: something extraordinary and quietly transformational. His fear of flying dissolved, almost completely, and not by accident.
Here’s what helped him. He wanted me to share it because it too changed his life in a lot of ways. Maybe it’ll help you.
1. Live the journey in your mind before you live it in the air.
Don’t suppress the fear, or postpone it. Step into it long before your departure. For months, or weeks if you can, rehearse every stage: driving to the airport, waiting in the terminal, boarding, takeoff, cruise, turbulence, getting up to pee, reading, feeling everything, landing. Treat your mind like a muscle. Repetition trains it. The more you mentally walk the path, the smaller and less intimidating the real thing becomes.
2. Dive into Captain Tom Bunn’s SOAR program.
Not passively, but intentionally. Read, watch, and absorb the articles and videos on Tom Bunn’s site: fearofflying.com. Most importantly, understand the amygdala’s role in the fear response, how it caches emotional memory, and how fears and anxieties can be deliberately retrained to be non-events. One of the huge elements of the program – associate fear or anxiety inducing events with a calm loving face of someone you trust. Seriously! Look at a picture of a plane taking off, then look at the face of your child, wife, Mom, Grandmother…whoever, just as long as the picture evokes a calm, pleasant memory. This is the turning point. Once you grasp the mechanism, the solution feels less like self-help mythology and more like internal engineering. You’re not negotiating with fear. You’re rewiring the system that produces it.
3. When you’re seated on the plane, study what calm looks like.
Watch the flight attendants. If the plane were in actual danger, they wouldn’t be serving coffee or sitting calmly in their jump seat talking to a co-worker during take-off’s and landings.. The crew does not mask danger with beverage service. Their composure is data.
Watch the water on your tray. What anxious flyers label as “turbulence” is nearly invisible in the cockpit — and the proof is sitting right there on your tray, sloshing less than it does when you backed out of your driveway today. Seriously! The water barely moves! The illusion feels bigger than the physics. Reality is steadier than fear narrates it in our heads.
Watch the excellent videos on Captain Tom Bunn’s site about turbulence.
If turbulence sends your heart into red alert mode, these are good ground rituals he swears by. (Spoiler Alert: Turbulence is wildly subjective).
4. Cut the noise sources that feed the fear.
Do not binge aviation disaster news. It’s exaggerated, sensational, and statistically dishonest.
And do not, under any circumstances, watch mainstream news about air travel incidents before flights. It is engineered for drama, not accuracy. It is distortion, not insight.
5. Replace dread with horizon-thinking.
Sit by the window. Watch the level horizon. Give yourself something better to imagine: the relief and exhilaration of arrival, the joy of immersion in what you’re traveling to experience, and the deep satisfaction of proving to yourself that fear wasn’t ever going to win…it was just old wiring.
Since the flights in this video, Willie has logged 80+ long-haul hours in the sky without fear, anxiety, or hesitation. He attributes this to these exercises. Period. He said he’s not numb to the fear, he’s literally enjoying flying. The whole process that it seems everyone complains endlessly about these days.
If his story helps even one person step onto a plane with a little more curiosity and a little less dread, then the footage was usable after all.
If you want to ask Willie a question about any of this, send him an email at willie@oscarslamp.com