Riding Airplanes

I have to put this question out there:  Does anyone else take stock of the other passengers on an airplane before boarding?

What I mean is that I tend to look around and gauge how many children will be on my flight, how many elderly people, and how many religious fanatics.  No, it's not what you're thinking.

Unlike most people, if there are a lot of small children and infants on a plane, I feel more confident about my flight.  I'm not concerned about crying children preventing me from sleeping, I am just glad that nothing out of the ordinary will happen.  This is going to sound incredibly morbid, I think, but if there is an unusually large number of elderly people on a plane I tend to get a little nervous.  If a plane full of children crashes and everyone dies, it will be a bigger tragedy than a plane full of octogenarians.  My thinking is that at least they will have lived their lives.  I fall somewhere in the middle; I've had a good life and there is more I could achieve but I've still had a good run.  Children haven't truly had the opportunity to live so my irrational thinking is that the universe won't pluck them out of the air. 

Same thing goes for the overly religious.  If I'm on a plane with people returning from a mission trip, I get nervous.  With so many people, whose souls are "right" with God, it's fruit ripe for the picking.  Of course, in this scenario it's more to do with the state of one's soul and less to do with fate/karma/Murphy's law and therefore children would also bring about my death via plane crash.  Unless you would also think that God would not take a large number of children so soon.  But let's not dwell on that fallacy in my thinking.

For the most part, I am perfectly comfortable with flying.  (Though, I always call my family before I leave on a trip and before I get on the return flight home just in case.)  In my mind, though, no matter how safe something is there is always a chance that something will go wrong.  To be fair, I think less about this when I get in my car than I do an airplane and I am definitely more likely to be killed in a car accident than a plane crash.  The thing that gets me though is that should something go wrong on an airplane you are pretty much screwed.  Maybe you survive the landing/crash but do you really want to go through that?  A car crash, the possibility of help reaching me in time is far more likely.   Recovery would certainly suck just as much, but emergency medical attention is more readily available for car crashes.

To be honest, flying in an airplane is the closest I come to faith these days.  First, I have faith that the pilots are well trained, alert, not overworked, or having a bad day.  Second, I have faith that the airplane has been properly maintained, fueled, packed, and latched. (My return flight home, for the record, had no small children, 1 mission trip group, and something that leaked on me the entire flight.)  Third,  I have faith that the science behind flight is sound even though I don't understand it.  Fourth, I have faith that there is a reason I need to continue living past this point in time.  Some sort of purpose that has yet to be fulfilled. 

I'm not afraid of flying.  But I do have a fear of death and an overactive imagination.