I Have to Fly in a What?

Delta sent me an email yesterday that due to schedule changes there, they have rescheduled our flights for South Carolina this summer. I saw that one new flight looked suspiciously like... a small plane. The 2.5 hour flight from Atlanta to Austin. Lovely.

I haven't always been skiddish about flying in small aircraft. As a teen, I loved flying, and had flown to and from Europe, a couple of times by myself. I had an absolute blast riding in a 4-seat Cessna over DFW once.

Today, I consider myself a mostly-recovered nervous flier.

The fear began very suddenly the day after I got married, when the plane left the airport gate, headed to Cancun for our honeymoon. Something just came over me, and before I knew it, I was crying and desperately fighting off a very ominous "impending freak-out" feeling. It went that way most of the trip. I just KNEW I had conquered cancer only to tragically crash into the Gulf of Mexico on my honeymoon. Yes, my life was a movie-of-the-week.

After Cancun, I kept flying, because they say that's how you get over it. And I have for the most part. We have continued to fly at least once a year. Take-off is now my only nervous time, and even that is completely bearable.

BUT... I haven't stepped foot on a small plane since a 20-passenger American Eagle flight from Dallas to College Station twenty years ago. That was awful. So noisy and bumpy. And that's when I was cool as a cucumber about the whole flying thing.

So the plane to which they had switched us was a Canadair 900, a 90-seat, 4-across model. Puddle jumper city! Okay, not a puddle jumper, but still. Also, that aircraft is owned and operated by another airline I've never heard of.

I called Delta and told them that I wasn't comfortable flying on it and they switched us to another flight. Now we're on a 737 from Savannah to Atlanta and an MD88 from Atlanta to Austin. Yay! I have to say they were very nice and didn't make a fuss about it at all. Thank you, Delta. I'm usually a Southwest girl, and I really appreciate good customer service. A+.