There’s Only One Thing That’s Soothed My Fear of Flying. It’s Pretty Horrible.

For the first two decades of my life, I was immune to flight anxiety. As a kid, I relished rickety Southwest flights to Florida for family beach trips. In high school, I slept through what I’m told was a historically turbulent flight to Nicaragua, waking only to savor my complimentary Canada Dry. In college, I sat back, relaxed, and enjoyed an eight-hour flight to Madrid, dreaming of the mountains, ham, and lovemaking that awaited me.

Then, in my early 20s, I streamed Sully, the 2016 flick starring Tom Hanks as airline Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger. It’s a courtroom drama following the case against Sullenberger, who was accused of negligence after landing US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River in 2009. Sullenberger was absolved—as it turns out, the plane’s engines were disabled by a massive flock of wayward birds. In hindsight, the movie was pretty dull, but the one brief sequence of peril as the plane hurtled into the Hudson—cockpit vibrating, passengers screaming in terror—because of birds? Birds, which famously live in the sky? The same place where the planes go? For some reason, it ruined me.

The next time I got on a plane, I lost it. I felt sick for days leading up to the flight. During takeoff, I experienced full-body weakness and an overwhelming panic that sent me hunching over in fright, panting into my own crotch, convinced of my imminent death.

This is embarrassing for a number of reasons. First, Sully was directed by Clint Eastwood, a walking stick of beef jerky whose artistic influence now has a humiliating hold on my psyche. Second, bird strikes—the official term for when a plane’s engine chops up a bunch of birds into bird slurry—usually aren’t dangerous. In fact, they happen every day.

Regardless, I still struggle with flying, despite employing numerous tactics to manage my fear. I’ve tried listening to Beyoncé during takeoff, reminding myself that she probably flies all the time and has never been felled by stray waterfowl. (I also listen to Viagra Boys—I feel that, if God were to strike someone down in a fiery plane crash, it would probably be a band called Viagra Boys and not me.) I even took a sightseeing flight on a tiny propeller plane during a recent trip to Peru, forcing myself to face my fear in the most nauseating way possible. But only one thing has made a dent in my flight anxiety: reading the work of Admiral Cloudberg, an aviation blogger who reports on air disasters in excruciating, fiery detail.

Written and fact-checked by independent blogger and podcaster Kyra Dempsey, Admiral Cloudberg is more than a Medium page about plane crashes. To me, along with the Admiral’s roughly 35,000 Medium readers, Admiral Cloudberg is an ardent investigator, a dedicated, self-taught journalist, and, against all odds, a balm for the flight-averse. Dempsey’s thoughtful probing into unthinkable tragedies is highly technical, and despite the jaw-dropping circumstances of the crashes themselves, her coverage is never salacious. Rather, it’s proof that many, many things must go wrong all at once for a plane crash to occur.

Take the Admiral’s recent analysis of Pakistan International Airlines Flight 8303, which crashed into a residential neighborhood in 2020 and killed 97 of the 99 people on board. She writes that the crash “defies rational comprehension,” resulting from a number of catastrophic mistakes including a final descent “so steep it bordered on madness” (a nose-down pitch angle of 13.7 degrees; a standard angle of descent is around 3 degrees), the crew’s inexplicable failure to extend the landing gear, and a display of stunning arrogance by the two individuals in the cockpit. “The sequence of errors, reckless decisions, and baffling misbehavior that enabled the disaster surpasses all but the most irredeemable blunders of the past,” writes the Admiral. I’m a nervous flyer, but what happened on that flight is so rare and bizarre that I can’t possibly fear it. I’m cured!

Then there’s the horrifying case of United Airlines Flight 811, a 1989 incident during which a hefty chunk of fuselage ripped away over the Pacific Ocean, sending nine passengers hurtling into the sky Final Destination–style. Unlike the PIA flight, the plane’s three pilots managed to land the plane safely, saving the lives of everyone else on board.

Where the PIA case was caused by a truly confounding, statistically unlikely level of human error, the United Airlines case was a technical failure—and, ultimately, a story of heroism. It’s also a story of improved safety measures. As the Admiral reports, the incident was caused partly by shoddy wiring, which had become widespread by 1989. After the disaster on Flight 811, the industry took note and brought commercial airline wiring back up to code.

That’s a resounding theme throughout the Admiral’s work. At the end of each post, she explains the lasting impact of every single crash on the aviation safety ecosystem, which soothes my Clint Eastwood–addled brain. And she’s thorough, too—her reporting is extensive and completely original, based on official crash documents from the Federal Aviation Administration (you can find these online) and contextual interviews with aviation experts including safety officials and academics. Her Medium posts are, on average, a 45-minute read.

That intensive, full-circle reporting feeds my fondness for Dempsey’s approach. Her blogs aren’t scary, and they don’t juice the horror of victims’ personal tragedies. She’s more interested in unpacking impacts on the aviation industry as a whole and criticizing the broken power structures and lack of oversight that caused these events in the first place. (Take, for example, the 1970 crash of ALM Antillean Airlines Flight 980, which Dempsey blames on a sequence of money-hungry decisions “made in company boardrooms months before the crash.”)

I have to say: This comforts me. Even as the aviation industry faces intense media scrutiny vis-à-vis missing parts, emergency landings, and a Boeing whistleblower’s mysterious death, the Admiral assures her readers that planes don’t just fall out of the sky. For a catastrophic crash to occur, nearly unfathomable failures must align across multiple—multiple—levels of clearance. Aviation professionals exist in a world of cross-checks and fancy terminology like “localizer and glideslope modes,” all of which help with my fears that the Christian devil might decide to crash my plane just to fuck with me.

Am I cured? No. I still experience uneasiness, particularly during takeoff. On a recent flight across the Colorado Rockies, I stashed my asthma inhaler in my sports bra just in case we crash-landed on a mountaintop and I couldn’t reach my backpack. But Admiral Cloudberg’s analyses serve as a trusty reminder of the true improbability that I, personally, will die on an airplane. It’s much more likely that I will die in a car crash, or from an illness, or from watching one too many films directed by Clint Eastwood. And if I do defy the odds and perish in a crumpled mass of steel and flame, the Admiral will handle my story with care. With any luck, there’ll be a Hulu documentary, too. I really love television.