Fear of flying

This is a funny old book, I must say. Some 248 pages about how aeroplanes fly. Chapter headings like Cockpit Instruments, Airplane Fuel and Flight Statistics. Who is it supposed to be for? Not pilots, surely, since they already know how planes fly. And not holiday-makers who happily jet from beach to beach, because they don't especially care. The only people I can imagine buying a book which explains the concept of flying are those who are frightened of it.

Happily enough, I am just such a person. My approach to aircraft technology is that of an ill-travelled New Guinea tribesman: "Big metal bird not stay in sky. Me stay on ground." I was once only mildly afraid, until I went for treatment with a fear-of-flying counsellor. Then he died in a plane crash. I'm not kidding.

I wouldn't say the whole experience allayed my suspicions.

Since then I have tried everything from hypnotherapy to good old-fashioned train travel, so I'm quite prepared to have a go at a book which might prove reassuring.

Unfortunately, those of us who fear flying tend not to be logical people. We do not operate by statistics, so don't come to us with your "millions-to-one". When we board a plane, it will either crash or it will not.

The odds are no more and no less than 50-50. We have overactive imaginations: we can already smell the burning fuselage, we can hear the prayers of terrified passengers, we can see the child's toy floating atop the ocean waves on that night's Channel 4 News. We like reading stories, and few of us were any good at school physics.

David Blatner does not really pander to our love of a good story. His relationship with the English language is not a masterful one. In discussing transport choices, for example, he tells us that "the invention of the airplane added to the soup by offering a double-edged sword" - which sounds like a complicated instrument with which to drink soup.

This shouldn't matter; we have chosen a practical book rather than a poetic one, and we need Blatner for his mechanical understanding rather than his ingenious way with metaphors.

I don't need my doctor to be witty or my newsagent to swim, so perhaps I don't need the fellow who understands Boeing engines to turn a beautiful sentence. But the problem is, we do need Blatner to be capable of boiling down the difficult principles of flight into language which we can understand.

Expressing complex science in simple comprehensible English is one of the toughest tricks of all, and Blatner seems to have misjudged the level at which he should pitch his explanations.

When he says "Air is sticky but not that sticky, so beyond a certain angle the Coanda Effect stops working and the air won't follow the surface of the wing any more", I'm afraid he's lost me. And, since the explanation builds from there, he doesn't ever get me back.

Dotted throughout The Flying Book I found isolated reassuring ideas - to think of air as invisible water, for example, with the aircraft sailing on it - but these come amid pages of physics which I'm too dumb to follow.