Fear of Flying

In yesterday's NYTimes there was an article about the decline in numbers of people taking flying lessons. The subject, it turns out, is a powerful example of gender politics. And it brings up something I had not thought about before. When, in the early 70s, everybody was trying to get women out of the home and into the workforce, the first thing that sprang into my twisted mind was, "Gee, double the workforce; now everyone will earn half as much." I forgot to consider the effect of this huge influx of female thinking on, well, everything, including what people do in their spare time.

The writer is talking about the drop in numbers of people who are learning to fly as hobbyists. It's a significant drop. After citing figures, the writer is trying to find the cause of this decline in interest. It's surprising since if you think about it, current trends favor hi-tech toys (though I think that there's a general trend, which isn't mentioned, toward staying at home and surrounding yourself with this expensive stuff).

Here's a quote from the article:

Ironically, an increasingly technological society is turning its back on a high-technology pastime.

One problem is fear, in an era when people describe their cars by the number of airbags, not the number of horses. In small planes, the statistics show that fatal accidents per 100,000 hours of flight fell by one-quarter in the decade ending in 2004, but some people in aviation fear that tolerance for risk is falling even faster.

ANOTHER is the shift of income and family decision-making to women. Industry leaders try hard not to sound like a former president of Harvard and attribute anything to innate skill, but women simply do not take up flying as frequently as men do.

“There’s been a big sociological and psychological change in the families of today, in where the discretionary dollars go,” said Phil Boyer, president of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association. When the husband told the stay-at-home mom of the 1950s that he was going to spend a Saturday afternoon taking flying lessons, she acquiesced, he said. Today, he said, in a two-income family, she is more likely to say: “You are not. That’s your day to take Johnny to the soccer game, and what the heck are you doing spending our hard-earned money on flying lessons?”

The article doesn't (dare) draw a correspondence between the two "problems": Fear and female influence. I think there definitely is one though. Our conditioning, as a society up through the 60s, was based on a perfect nuclear-family mythos, where the little woman's job was to be the brakes, and the man's job was to be the gas. I have to say that the overwhelming majority of women I know have little use for the big male ideas, like space exploration, or building great huge giant phallic edifices that thrust themselves through the cloud cover.

I am not saying women are chicken at all. I'm suggesting that women have been conditioned to be the brake pedal, the crossing guard, the person who says, "Put that down; you'll poke somebody's eye out!" "Look both ways before you cross the street." "Don't run with that! You'll fall down and stab yourself!" "Go wash your hands; you don't know WHERE that's been!" And now a whole bunch of them (us) suddenly have a powerful voice in government and business and modern thought. And just look at the way advertising has mutated in response. I'm not saying it's not a good thing, necessarily, but it bears scrutiny. Women have been conditioned to be risk averse. It's also very scary to be out and participating in an arena from which your mothers and role models were banned. I have to laugh when I hear women say things like, "Thank god that equality thing is settled." Is it now? Then how come we only make $0.75 for each dollar a man makes? Anyway.

Ecological bad influences and fuel expenses aside, both of which, by the way are fixable, women have not been conditioned like men have to view flying as a thrilling metaphor for freedom. It strikes, I think, so many of us as a waste of time. "You're going flying when people are dying by the thousands in Africa? You heartless selfish monster!"

Like I said I don't know how to think about this, but I know I've definitely spent some time in recent years deploring what I see as a loss of courage in American society. I know that's a judgmental thing to say, but just look at how successful the Bush administration has been at getting its policies through by the simple expedient of screaming "OH MY GOD TERR[OR]ISTS WILL BOMB THE GRADE SCHOOL DOWN THE STREET TOMORROW IF YOU DON'T PASS THIS LEGISLATION!" every other day. For the past six years, we've all been jumping at shadows and trying to peer around corners miles in advance and generally quaking in our boots. It's just weird. I think it's a response to the increased anxiety that human beings experience when they are thrust into unfamiliar situations.

I know there are large numbers of men who feel this way too. I think it's easier for them to admit to it now that there is an alternative to the once-pervasive idea of what maleness entails.

The article goes on to quote this flying instructor on the difficulties he faces trying to teach women to fly:

Mr. Boyer’s association is trying hard to make flying more appealing to women, including offering training in how to read aviation maps, talk on the radio and provide other help in the plane, and maybe transitioning them to earning a license themselves. But 95 percent of the students are still male, he said.

At the airport in Smoketown, Matt Kauffman, the chief flight instructor at Aero-Tech Services, the only flight school here, said that the training system had not adapted itself to women. “Women learn differently from men,” Mr. Kauffman said. “If two men go up, they will scream and shout, and a transfer of knowledge occurs, and we’d get back on the ground and go have a beer, and life is good,” he said. “If you yell at a woman, she’d start crying, and she’d never come back.” He would like to hire a female flight instructor but can’t find one, he said.

This last observation brought a wry smile to my face. I didn't learn to drive until I was 28, because of the way driving was "taught" in my high school, which was exactly the way this guy describes guys learning to fly. You had the driving instructor in the front seat, and a back seat full of hearty, sarcastic, loud, intimidating high school boys, all of whom were screaming at you. I find it hard to believe anyone can learn anything under these conditions, but apparently it's only me and some other people without penises. I went to exactly one driving class and never went back. I believe my exact words, when questioned, were, "Fuck that noise." I sure as hell would not spend my hard-earned money on that experience. I mean, you do not want me at the throttle of an airplane thousands of feet above the ground in the state of mind I get into when people are yelling at me.

I acknowledge however that there is a powerful and successful outfit who is teaching people stuff all the time using the yelling method: Our Armed Services. I am not the person to write on the changes that military training has had to make in response to the influx of women, but I bet it's had to adapt.

At any rate, I don't think I like the idea of our abandoning those big, impractical, thrilling enterprises. I remember I didn't like the way they were glorified. And the injunction to "be a MAN" is not as effective as it once was. But I find myself missing thoughtful bravado in a world where everyone is hellbent on planning out his/her entire life in his/her Daytimer, and doling out his/her time in stingy little driblets, as though it were the last few drops of water in a cloudless desert.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/26/fashion/26pilot.html?em&ex=1177819200&en=3d74feb7e7e3bc73&ei=5087%0A