Wie ich lernte, das Fliegen zu hassen

written on November 8, 2026, read 2003

I’ve mentioned this book before: anyone who has read my piece about how I lost my fear of flying will already know it. It’s an important book to me. Not because it’s good – for the most part, it’s nothing special, not even particularly well written. The style won’t exactly sweep you off your feet. Of all places, I bought it at Frankfurt Airport. I wasn’t flying, though; this was back in my fear-of-flying days. I had a work appointment near the airport, two hours to spare before my train and, unfortunately, no flexible rail ticket. To kill time¹, I went into the terminal and came across a bookshop. I know I bought more than one book there, but lying by the till was this one: “Wie ich lernte, das Fliegen zu hassen” (“How I Learned to Hate Flying”, published in English as “Why I Hate Flying”) by Henry Mintzberg.

It may seem odd for someone with a fear of flying to buy a book about hating flying. I didn’t like flying anyway; I needed no instructions for that. But perhaps I wanted to hate it properly. So that I would stop standing so wistfully in front of the clattering split-flap departures board at Frankfurt Airport. So that I wouldn’t get that faraway look again whenever I heard that friends or colleagues had been to the US.

Mintzberg describes many things in his book that are genuinely hateful. Back then, I thought: flying is actually a thoroughly unpleasant activity. Depending on your class, you pay different amounts of money to be distracted from this central fact. Once I had overcome my fear of flying and was flying a great deal, both for work and privately, I realised: Mintzberg was right. I was right. It’s unpleasant. It’s annoying. And nobody would put up with it if it didn’t get them from A to B. Getting on a plane just to be carried from A to A in economy, wedged into a far too narrow seat, spooning reheated food out of a tray – only a handful of complete loonies would put themselves through that voluntarily. It’s the few hours or days between the outbound and return flights that make it all worthwhile. Then again, during the pandemic there really were flights to “nowhere”, because you weren’t allowed to land “somewhere”. That doesn’t make the loonies any less loony, but it does show there are more of them than you’d think.

But I believe Mintzberg doesn’t really hate flying any more than I do. And I don’t mean looking out of the window. Yes, that can be breathtakingly beautiful at times. In his book, Mintzberg writes about a woman named Anne whom he got to know on a flight. And I have a faint impression that this encounter makes up for a lot, if not everything, for him. I never met an Anne on my many flights. But I did meet many other people who have stayed in my memory. The enormous Scandinavian next to me who was even more afraid of flying than I ever was. The guy with the Hebrew edition of Playboy. And above all, the woman with her baby on the flight from Boston to Amsterdam in 2001² – two people I still think of now and then. 25 years later. By now, the baby has probably finished university. It’s the interesting people you meet. The ones you sometimes can’t avoid, however introverted you may be – and at the end of the journey, you’re glad you didn’t.

A book that went forth to teach me how to hate flying ended up teaching me that flying isn’t so bad after all. That’s why it matters so much to me.