Image source: Wikimedia
For parents of neurodiverse kids, air travel can be a challenging endeavour. Planes are big and loud (though not as loud as in the early days of jet travel), and for the kids, it is an unfamiliar environment. Going to the airport, checking, going through security screening, as well as lots and lots of waiting, and that is all before even getting on the plane. I also recall having an unusual phobia of luggage carousels, but that is story for another day. Some airports even provide special facilities to assist with needs like this. The fact is, air travel can be test of patience for even the neurotypical.
My first time travelling by air took place in the mid 1980s, when I was still a very young toddler. It was a medium-haul trans-Tasman flight from Wellington to Melbourne. In this era, in-flight entertainment was also much more limited at the time – no WiFi, no movies on demand, and no seat-back trivia games. If you wanted music and the batteries in your Walkman ran out, you could listen to a preset tape via a set of pneumatic headphones that resembled a doctor’s stethoscope.
Although I was too young to remember that flight, my mother certainly did remember it. She had me sleeping on a sheepskin rug on the floor…at least that’s what she thought. In an era long before airlines charged an arm and a leg for checked luggage, people had less carry-on baggage and economy passengers were not packed in like sardines either. This meant that there was plenty of room down there to spread out and get some rest, but as you may or may not know, sleeping is something that neurodiverse people are not always very good at, and on waking up, I set out on an adventure to some place exciting, like the galley, the toilets, or maybe the cockpit (this was pre-9/11 of course). My plans, however, were foiled, as after crawling under several rows of seats, a flight attendant had found me, and brought me back to my mother.
I did have several toy planes growing up, including the Fisher Price jetliner, and of course, Lego. I recall once building a “plane” out of Lego with my dad that depicted my family flying to Christchurch to see Grandma – with me at the front as the pilot. Several years later, in school, one of our class studies was about going to the airport, and we even did a field trip there. A highlight, however, was at the age of 10, when I went on a Qantas flight with my brother from Sydney to Christchurch – once we had landed, I excitedly told my mother about how we flew in a “Boing[sic] 747″. Prior to that, the Queen of the Skies was something I had only seen in books and on TV.
The next major plane trip I embarked on was when my family moved to the US, which involved flying three legs on United, starting with a 12 hour leg on a 747 from Auckland, with layovers in LAX and Orlando. With a handful of Roald Dahl books, and my brother’s Game Boy, we travelled over 14,000 km (about 8800 miles) over the course of over 24 hours, and in true neurodiverse fashion, I did not sleep a wink.
Over the next few years, I did not get to fly very much aside from a short trip to the Bahamas (on a 737-200).
In 1999, I got to take a transatlantic flight for the first time with Virgin Atlantic (747s) and later with British Airways (777). The final leg on the return trip was on board a Beechcraft 1900, a small 19 seat turboprop that would make even a City and South London Railway tube train feel spacious.
Like other interests I had as a child, my interest in planes waned, but never went away. In fact, when I was in graduate school, the professor I was working with offered me a ride in his Piper Cherokee. Several days later, I was riding my bike out to the airport to meet with a flight instructor with his Cessna 172, and that is when things literally started to take off on my journey towards attaining a private pilot license.
Unusually, piloting a small aircraft is something that’s just perfect for some types of neurodiverse minds – there are well defined processes and procedures – especially checklists – and flying with instruments requires a lot of precision and the ability to focus on the task at hand.
Flying, however, is as a rather expensive hobby, and while autism and mental health medications do not automatically disqualify one from getting an FAA medical certificate, they do create extra bureaucracy.
Although I have not piloted a plane recently due to the above reasons, I still have a fascination with these big machines, and in the event that a flight attendant asks “By the way, is there anyone on board who knows how to fly a plane?”, I might be able to help.