::::::::::::: E Street :::::::::::::
Nancy Perry Graham
Editor, AARP THE MAGAZINE
aarpmagazine@aarp.org
When Dreams
Take Flight
One man I remember in particular—
Al, 64, a comptroller with a fear of
heights, who had never been on a
plane. Longing to travel, Al had decided it was time to confront his lifelong
phobia. This class would force him to
do it: on the afternoon of the second
day, we would fly to Raleigh, North
Carolina, and receive our wings. For
many in that class it would be the
scariest two days of their life.
On the first day of the AAir Born
class we shared our stories. A frequent flier, I had been landing at
Chicago’s O’Hare Airport on May 25,
1979, when American Airlines Flight
191 took off on a parallel runway, lost
an engine, and nosedived, killing 273
I once took an American
Airlines fear-of-flying
class for a Fortune story
I was writing on executives who are afraid to fly.
(I personally don’t have a
fear of flying—but, rather,
of crashing.) It was a scene
out of The Bob Newhart
Show: envision 24 of us,
crammed into the Holiday
Inn in Newark for two days,
sharing our neurotic fears.
“Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth / And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings.” —John Gillespie Magee Jr., a 19-year-old volunteer with the Royal Canadian Air Force who was killed in 1941
people—to this day, the deadliest air
disaster on U.S. soil. Two others in
our class had been in airplane acci-
dents. Some suffered from claustro-
phobia. For Phyllis, whose husband
had died of leukemia three years
earlier, flying was the last of a long list
of fears she was “shucking off.”
After two days of lessons on how
airplanes stay in the air, practice with
deep breathing, and a trip to the cock-
pit to meet Captain George, it was
time for our flight. As we rode in tense
silence to the airport, one woman
turned to her mother and said, “I feel
like I’m going to my death today.”
Once we were seated on the MD-80,
the frightened young woman next to
me began to weep. That’s when I real-
ized the magnitude of what I was wit-
nessing: a group of incredibly brave
What would you do if you weren’t afraid? Dreams come in many
shapes and sizes. Have you always wanted to play a piano recital? Earn your degree? Go
into space? Reconnect with a family member? Conquer your fear of public speaking? Visit
the Eiffel Tower? Whatever your dream, we’d like to be there when you make it happen, for a
department we’ll launch in our next issue called “Imagine If…” Go to aarp.org/yourstory.
people facing their very worst fear.
You know by now that we all made
it to Raleigh—and back. Al’s family
was waiting for him at the Newark air-
port, colored balloons celebrating his
jubilant return. But what I remember
most was the look of joy on Al’s face
as we soared above the clouds—and it
dawned on him that his dreams of vis-
iting San Francisco, New Orleans, and
Rome were suddenly within reach.
“This has been one of the greatest
experiences of my life,” he later told
me. “I’m angry at myself for not doing
it a long time ago.”
Several years ago I read the book
Who Moved My Cheese? A line from
it has become my guiding principle:
“What would you do if you weren’t
afraid?” In answering that question,
I found the courage to adopt our
third child, Taylor, when I was 50.
And I thought back to Al and my flying
buddies, whose courage had let their
dreams take flight.
