A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

 

Fear of Flying

 

We depart the Canadian prairie for Barbados tonight. A lovely Caribbean holiday awaits us. The trouble is we have to get from A to B, or in our case, from YEG to BGI with a layover in YYZ. Beyond the usual hassles and hell of added fees, security and other people, there is a low voltage undercurrent of fear: Here be dragons. Deep down every traveller knows they’re one mechanical glitch, one clever hijacker, one suicidal pilot, one surface-to-air missile away from oblivion. And that oxymoronic panel in the safety brochure about LANDING ON WATER? It’s just a Neil Young album; anyone who’s ever belly-flopped off a diving board knows that water hits back like concrete. Needless to say, the photographs in this morning’s Globe and Mail of Air Canada Flight 624’s wreckage Sunday a hair or two short of a runway at Halifax’s Stanfield International Airport were a little disconcerting. My first thought was: Wow! No fatalities! A miracle! My second thought was a little more in character: That better not have been the Airbus 320 scheduled to take us to Bridgetown tonight.