I’ve got GK Chesteron’s Orthodoxy on my lap right now and he’d totally agree that the more rational you are the more deluded you will be.
Not sure the legality in whatever state/country you live in is but THC edibles to bring on the plane would do a great relax you for the flight.
In any state, booze will (somewhat) work, too. I did that once.
I was interviewing for a position in a small town (right after grad school so I was still suffering from the rosary incident) and they had booked our flights for us. I remember to this day we were in row 8.
I said, “Oh, good, we’re near the front of the plane,”
And the gate agent said, “No, that’s the back row.”
I went straight to the bar. Good thing DH was there to make sure I got on the plane.
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I live on a (very) small island and used to travel to another (slightly bigger) island for work every Thursday on a type of aircraft called a Trislander, with room for 16 passengers. I regularly saw tourists refuse to board when they saw the aircraft.
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Yup, that was about the size of it.
I live in an even smaller town now, but have the sense to drive. I have colleagues who own planes, one who even built one. But doctors are terrible pilots. Overconfident. Well, at least the surgeons are. The internists probably analyze every little thing, so I’d fly with one of them. But then they’d never make a quick decision so maybe not.
Lots of people over here have PPLs and own shares in small planes (or own them outright if they’re well off). Some fly helicopters too. Never heard of anyone here building their own though - kudos!
Yes, I guess that small private planes are hard to buy now? They don’t make very many of them any more due to litigation. So one of my friends actually built his own, he has not crashed as far as I know. He was featured in the newspaper some years ago, so it must be a rare thing.
For those that have a little fear of flying, I love answering any questions and explaining how things work. If I am busy with something and a visitor would be a distraction, I ask the flight attendant to have them stop in after the flight.
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How to make flying less scary? Imagine if we all had that Star Trek technology where we could beam ourselves anywhere. I imagine having your body torn into molecules and sent wherever in the universe is much scarier than getting into a machine that million of people use weekly, if not daily for very safe travel.
But then, I do tend to go to “worst case scenario” for a comparison. 
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I’ve actually thought of that myself. In fact, I wrote a short story once where people figured out how to interfere with the current state of one’s mind as they are being transported and, upon re-assembly, modified the person SLIGHTLY so as a means to control their thoughts!
I also wondered if, the first time you are transported, if your original self ceases to exist and all you have left is a clone of yourself (kind of like in the movie “The Prestige”, sort of).
Well, if you’re going any distance, presumably it’s not your actual molecules that are transported, but the map of how to put you back together. For Star Trek, they were just going short distances, but still, one would think it’s actually easier to commandeer any surrounding molecules for the reconstruction than to keep track of each original molecule. I think the real question is whether the body would experience any type of momentary death, and if so, then likely your story is true, because the mind would have to be put back together to ‘forget’ or never experience that death.
But now we’re really off topic, lol.
In my short time here, I’ve never observed anyone going off topic. Every topic is fair game, apparently.
I think this is closer to what would really happen. But I’m not a reductionist, I think the mind is at the very least, an epiphenomenon.