YOUR FORECASTS ARE HELPING ME CURE MY FEAR OF FLYING!
Peter, not only are your forecasts helping me choose the best day to flight for a smooth flight, your forecasts are also actually helping cure me of my fear of flying!
First, my fear of flying is FEAR OF TURBULENCE. I understand that others’s fear of flying may be fear of heights, or they may be claustrophobic or do not like all the sounds the airplane makes (which is the easiest problem to cure by wearing a good set of sound proof headphone or even using a pair of headphones to listen to soothing music or to be distracted by a movie or an audio novel).
As I shared with you before, I had a Private Pilot’s license with an Instrument Rated Flying certification. And my fear of turbulence started when I got trapped flying into a small thunderstorm and experiences strong turbulence in my small airplane. My fear intensified when I had the responsibility of raising three small children and trying to pick the best day to fly safely. And hiding my fear from my children only added to my stress.
My fear of turbulence is aggravated when flying in clouds and also when encountering turbulence at high altitudes. Strangely my fear of turbulence on descents and landings (unless extreme) is not so bad because I figure I am going to land soon one way or the other! Turbulence on take-offs when it extends beyond the normal takeoff turbulence from the wake turbulence of other aircraft bothers me more because I wonder what the rest of the flight is going to be like.
Well, your excellent forecasts which show the probabilities of turbulence and estimate how long the turbulence will last, have help me greatly. Now that I have used your forecasts on dozens of flying trips, the knowledge of what I can expect and when and how long and how strong the turbulence will be is slowing curing me of my fear of turbulence. Because I do not tense up so much anymore at the first bumps that we encounter knowing that Peter forecast that the turbulence will only last for XX minutes.
I am even helping other people on the airplane with their discomfort with turbulence! And I tell them about your website of course. I was sitting next to a guy who I observed with sweaty palms and he could not seat still. I asked him, “Do you have to fly often? And do you not like to fly?” And “yes”, he was a businessman who had to fly often and did not like turbulence and I assured him that he was on an A- or at the worst a B+ flight so just relax. Well, he did not believe me until I told him that the light turbulence we were experiencing was because we were passing through a cloudless stationary front and that the turbulence would only last about 5 minutes. Then he belived me and started to relax.
Another incident was when a 10 year old boy sat next to me who was flying by himself and would not even talked to me until the stewardess told him that I was a good guy and it was OK for him to talk to me. So I distracted him during the flight. On landing approach, he was getting very scared again as we were flying thru a scattered layer of clouds. So I told him that the mild turbulence was caused by the clouds and to start counting with me each second, “one, two, three, four…” and see the mild turbulence lasts only about 5 seconds as we pass thru each cloud. He was so happy and even started to enjoy it like a roller coastal ride I told him.
John from Raleigh, NC