As you know, all people are divided into three categories: those who are not afraid to fly, those who are afraid, and those who have never flown. And often citizens from the third category are safely transferred to the second, that is, they join the army of aerophobes. Which, in fact, once happened to me. Before the first flight took place, I looked at airplanes and everything connected with them with blissful optimism, and I even looked forward to the first takeoff from the ground. But, having boarded plane by a normal person, she went down the stairs already as an aerophobe, since she had made almost all the main mistakes of an aerophobe, which she wrote about in the previous article. It is here. The main mistakes of an aerophobe or How to earn aerophobia on the first try. When a person makes these mistakes, aerophobia is formed instantly and on the first try. . Photo from the pixabay photobank After that remarkable flight that I was talking about then, five years passed before I decided to fly somewhere by plane again.... On the one hand, it’s good to live in the very center of the continent, and even at an altitude of 200 meters above sea level. You are not in danger of a tsunami. But there are also disadvantages - it’s a long way to get everywhere. Traveling for days by train is not an option for me. It's better to survive four hours of fear - and you're there. Moreover, over the five years, the impressions of the previous flight have become a little dull and faded in my memory. This time I had to fly to Kyiv. I must say that it was 2012, literally a couple of years before the beginning of the tragic chain of well-known events... The small red plane that approached the bus on the runway immediately seemed to me somehow undignified, inappropriate for the status of international airlines. I even thought that some kind of mistake had occurred. Will such a plane reach its destination? But inside it was quite cozy, and as always, the moment it took off from the ground caused delight. The sun beat through the portholes, and below, patches of green fields, the ribbon of the Ob, and the blue of the Ob Sea floated in the haze. I don’t remember much of what happened next, because I was shaking all the way, continuing to make the list of aerophobe mistakes. The main one of these mistakes was scanning the flight. I listened all the time and controlled the flight of the plane: How are the engines humming? Are they still in place, have they suddenly fallen off? Why is it shaking so much? ?Why did the plane start to fall - maybe we are falling? Will I have time to get to the toilet before it falls? What if the door to the toilet jams when it starts to fall? 4 hours later I stepped onto the sunny Ukrainian soil, wrung out like a lemon. I only remember that the summer air, damp after the rain, smelled bright and fragrant and it was different for that hour of the day. the sun on the horizon. Photo from the pixabay photo bank. How did I manage to get rid of aerophobia? The cure in my case was spontaneous. The return flight was at night. After takeoff, the lights of the Boryspil airport fell into the darkness under the wing. About an hour later, a streak of dawn appeared above the horizon - we were flying to the East. Whether it was the lack of sleep, or the excess of impressions from the trip, I don’t know. At first, out of habit, I was afraid and scanned the flight. Then I suddenly got tired of everything, I sat back in my chair and decided: “Come what may.” To fall is to fall. In the end, people are not eternal, and we will all die from something someday." Paradoxically, this somehow immediately made me feel better. And a few minutes later, when I looked out the porthole at the slowly swirling under the dawn sun clouds, a thought as straight as an arrow pierced my brain: “What if we DO NOT fall?” I remember how this thought shocked me, because before that I had only thought about one thing - “what if we fall” That is, exactly? the opposite. After a new thought, the brain started working in a different direction. “But it’s true, we may not fall! How did I not think of this before!” The brain immediately automatically calculated the probability of NOT falling. The second surprise: it turned out that the probability of not falling in the remaining hour! the flight, whatever one may say, is very high. And, most likely, it will be that in an hour I will land on my native Siberian land in the bluish haze of burning fires.