Below Ten Thousand Feet

As someone with generalized anxiety and a fear of flying, the statistics regarding the relative safety of airplane travel are only marginally helpful to me. Instead of focusing on the fact that the odds of being killed in flight are one in 11 million, I tend to focus on the “Plus Three/Minus Eight” rule which describes the fact that takeoffs and landings, especially landings, are the most dangerous time of each flight. For me, just the knowledge that I am below ten thousand feet in an airplane is anxiety-producing. Sitting in a window seat, near the wing, helps to mitigate my anxiety and I also discovered a few years ago that putting my mind to work creating time-lapse photographs puts me in control of something and gives me something to concentrate on besides my irrational thoughts of crashing. Call it art therapy if you’d like or just enjoy the miracle of aviation engineering captured through modern photographic technology.