I used to like flying, and, in fact, that was how I traveled from home to college several times a year each year. Only in my senior year, when I had a girlfriend who needed help (or actually company) driving her car to school did I start driving. But we would still sometimes fly east during term breaks. I found coach service pre-2001 to be perfectly adequate, though, of course the quality of service started declining from the moment airline deregulation started in the early 1980s.
I also had a couple of semi--scary flights in the 1980s involving turbulence or minor (so they said) mechanical mishaps that started making me a white-knuckle flier. It also didn't help that time I had a seatmate who was a Navy pilot who made all sorts of faces as our aging TWA 727 taxied, took off, and jinked around as it was climbing trying to avoid the thunderstorm cells. All he said after we reached cruising altitude was "Needs new brakes. Needs new flaps." We did make it into St. Louis without any mishaps, but I was a bit nervous. Another time, I flew United into DIA a couple of weeks after it opened, and the pilot misjudged the approach (first time he'd ever landed there), had to abort the landing and flew us around for another try. I experienced an actual "touch and go" landing at BWI on a British Airways L1011 on a flight back from London. It was scattered thunderstorms, but the pilot was landing on visual, and just as he touched the ground, the skies opened up and he couldn't see down the runway (at least that's what they told us), so we immediately blasted off, circled around and landed once the rain moved off the runway. Twice I was on American Airlines, flying to DFW when the pilot aborted the takeoff halfway down the runway because "a warning light came on." We taxied back to the terminal and sat around while the mechanics went over the plane, and then we went on our way. I even made my connections at DFW both times. Then there was the 2 AM departure from Tel Aviv on El Al. While we were boarding, we saw that the door was pretty much completely disassembled, and mechanics were swarming all over it. There's a lot of complex mechanisms inside an airplane door.
Anyway, the result is that I fly (can't dispute the safety statistics), but the minute I approach the airport in the car or taxi, I start tensing up, and I don't relax until the landing of my last flight segment. The minute the pane starts rolling down the runway, I start relaxing. This is irrational, of course, as we're still going 100+ mph and a lot of stuff could still go wrong. The cramped seating, the crowds, the TSA lines and general understaffing of service personnel contribute to making the experience less than pleasant. Because of this, for trips 500 miles or less, I'll drive or take the train (if possible) rather than fly. Otherwise, I just grit my teeth and endure the pain of air travel, as the unpleasantness is usually limited to about 8 hours, including time in the airport. I do sometimes take the train for overnight trips, but I'm doing that partly because I just enjoy the experience of riding a train overnight.
