Erika Engelhaupt: Fear Of Flying
The Story Collider
Story Collider, Inc.
4.4 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 12 March 2016
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Erika Engelhaupt gets a dream reporting assignment. There's just one problem--she has to take a small prop plane just like the one that she almost crashed in years ago. Erika Engelhaupt is a science writer and editor. At the time of this show, she is about to start a new job as the online science editor at National Geographic. She was most recently a deputy managing editor at Science News magazine, where she started her blog, Gory Details. Gory Details covers all that is creepy, bizarre, or otherwise strangely fascinating in science, from psychopaths to what happens when you pee in the pool. Basically, she likes to give people the creeps, but in a good way. Erika's work has appeared in Science News, The Philadelphia Inquirer, on National Public Radio and in many other newspapers and magazines. Before becoming a writer, she had lots of adventures in biogeochemistry, many of which involved wearing hip waders in Louisiana swamps.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A science story, huh? |
| 0:04.0 | Is NYU scientist the... |
| 0:06.0 | It felt... |
| 0:07.0 | I felt... |
| 0:08.0 | I was so... |
| 0:09.0 | And I just thought, well... |
| 0:10.0 | It was that golden moment. |
| 0:12.0 | Because science was on my side. |
| 0:15.0 | ...theid... Hey everyone, I'm Ben Lilly, and welcome to The Story Collider, where we bring you true personal stories about science. |
| 0:31.7 | This week's stories from Erica Englehaupt. It was recorded in October 2015 at Oberon in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as part of the Science Writers |
| 0:39.6 | 2015 meeting. |
| 0:50.3 | In the late 90s, I lived in New Orleans, and I was flying into New Orleans one day, almost home when one of the engines went out in the airplane. |
| 1:04.0 | It feels like someone has pulled the floor out from under you. |
| 1:10.0 | We just dropped what felt like 50 feet in a second. |
| 1:15.4 | And the plane just started pitching and wobbling. |
| 1:20.0 | And right at the same moment, everyone started to cry. |
| 1:25.9 | I was sitting in the front of the plane by myself and I thought, this is it. |
| 1:34.0 | We were over Lake Pontchartrain and it looked like the ocean. And I thought, we're going down |
| 1:42.0 | and I'm going to die in that lake. |
| 1:51.2 | It was a really small plane, one of those twin turbo props with the propellers on each wing. |
| 1:58.8 | And this was before 9-11, before there were like those reinforced cockpit doors to keep people from getting in. So there was just this stiff curtain between me |
| 2:02.1 | and the cockpit. And I could hear through that stiff curtain a computerized voice telling the pilot |
... |
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