The embarrassing mistake that meant I missed my flight

Check-in opens three days from now and already my nerves are shot. I fumble through my workdays, heart quavering. I sleep fitfully, dread avalanching through my veins, dreams disrupted by nightmares in which I’m sprinting along the runway in pursuit of ascending planes.

It makes no sense. My documents are in order, my bag is packed. Decades of punctual departures lie behind me. But my primitive brain dismisses the logic; it’s convinced I’ll miss my flight.

The distance I must traverse from my home to the airport 30 kilometres away represents a yawning badland mined with booby-traps: traffic jams, rail strikes, disoriented Uber drivers. If by some miracle I check in on time, new catastrophes will surely lie in wait on the other side of security. Has my flight been called? Have I got the departure gate right? Forget evolution’s fight or flight theory; fright before flight is my default psychological setting.

I once arrived for a flight five hours before the final call.Credit: iStock

Unlike the inverse anxiety, aerophobia, fear of not flying is an enigmatic curse, a preposterous terror that can’t be rationalised. It’s more absurd still for seasoned travellers like me: beyond the departure gate, the unknown and the uncomfortable inspire no such foreboding. Trapped in an economy seat for 17 hours, approached by rifle-wielding soldiers as I disembark the plane, led to an interview room by grim-faced border control officials in a strange country? I’ve handled such inconveniences with comparative ease. But try as I might to rewire my limbic system, I’m incapable of boarding a flight perspiration-free.

It’s a time-wasting bugbear. I once arrived at New York’s JFK International Airport five hours before the final call. Extreme promptitude made perfect sense to me: I’d spent a month at an international writers’ residence in the Hudson Valley, and didn’t want to miss my flight home. Imaginary landmines were laid along the railway line connecting me to the airport, and in the multiple route changes required of me.

Credit: Jamie Brown

“Come on!” chorused my fellow scribes, who’d converged here from distant parts of the world. “You know the ropes – why leave so soon?”

“A whole day early is preferable to one minute late,” I lectured in response. “Just one obstruction on the track or a missed connection and my travel plans will be upended.”

Their cackles of mirth still echo down through the years, a ghostly challenge to relinquish control and push the boundaries of punctuality. And so I have – unintentionally.

My flight record, it turns out, isn’t as squeaky-clean as I’ve made it out to be. Five years after those writer friends gently berated me, my nightmare became reality. For the first time – and the last, travel gods willing – I missed a flight. The reason is deeply embarrassing: I mistook the time of arrival in Maun for the hour of departure from Cape Town.

It’s a moment of inattention that still haunts me; the humiliation and expense I’ve tried to expunge from memory. A bush pilot was waiting at my destination to transfer me to the Okavango Delta; the next flight out of Cape Town was in two days’ time. So I detoured to Johannesburg, spent a night in an airport hotel, took the morning flight out. I arrived a full 24 hours late, flawless record besmirched and tail quivering between jellied legs.

Did the relinquishment of control cure me of my pathological punctuality? On the contrary, it underscored its necessity. More compulsively than ever, I now check and recheck the date, the departure time, the traffic conditions that might make me late. It’s no good, of course. I know as surely as day becomes night that the plane will depart without me.