What must it be like to lose an entire part of your family – your son, his wife and their children; your sister, her husband and their children – in one fell swoop? Many people, over the last few days, have together found out the answer to that question, as a result of the horrific plane crashes in Greece and in Venezuela. The plane that went down in South America killed 152 French citizens from the Caribbean island of Martinique, all of whom were holiday-makers: parents with their children, and parents taking a break away from their children, with each other. Plane crashes in August are much more devastating, in their far-reaching consequences, than plane crashes at any other time of the year. In August, passengers are mainly families on holiday with their children, or even worse perhaps, without them.

One commentator said in Martinique: “Today, there are many new orphans here.” I wonder how, and by whom, the news was broken to them that the mothers and fathers who had gone on holiday for a few days were never going to return. What a recipe for serious psychiatric problems. The plane that went down outside Athens took with it roughly the same number of people, and again, practically all of them were holidaying families, or teenagers travelling alone. I try to grasp what it must be like, as a mother or a father, to go to the airport to pick up a son or a daughter, and to wait and wait, to see the sign flash up – “delayed” – and then to hear that everyone on that plane has been wiped out. Possibly, the most merciful thing that can happen to anyone in that position is to suffer a fatal heart attack on the spot, and to spin off into oblivion. To live would be just too much punishment.

Surely the most awful thing for these people, the ones left behind - almost worse than the knowledge that you will never see the dead again – is trying to come to terms with the nature of their last few minutes of life, torturing themselves with imaginings of what it must have been like, what they could have felt, the fear, the horror. Those who lost an entire household of their extended family, and there are many in that position, have the added misery of having to walk into the house of the dead people – a ghost house – left as is at their departure because they took their return for granted, having to clear it out entirely, and sort out their affairs. What must that be like – throwing out your dead grand-daughter’s clothes, your dead grandson’s school-case, your dead daughter’s make-up and underwear, the dirty clothes still in the laundry basket, the washed clothes still in the tub for ironing, food still in the refrigerator, shampoo still on the shower shelf. The mind bends and twists away from this kind of nightmare. What courage it must take to do it.

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The news of the plane that crashed into the sea on its way from Italy to Djerba, in recent days, was frightening too. It seems not to have generated as much dismay in the news because it was a smaller plane, carrying fewer people and most of them were youngish couples, rather than families. It struck me severely because we were on one of those planes to Djerba a couple of years ago, and I distinctly remember feeling a deep clutch of fear – irrational, perhaps, but there all the same – and praying madly to St Anthony all the way (St Anthony is unique in that he appears to have a monopoly on the deeply irreligious).

The only other time I have felt sick with dread while flying was on another small plane, between Rome and Florence, on a stormy winter’s evening. I was so worried and unhappy that I couldn’t even pick up my book – a very rare circumstance indeed. When we landed, I had a primeval urge to hit everyone out of the way and rush down the stairs, and was immediately beset by the less than respectful suspicion that the reason the Pope kissed the ground each time he got off a plane was not the reason we imagined.

There were times when I was plagued with uncertainty, but never more so than when sitting inside a waiting plane, on a runway somewhere in Italy, for an inordinate amount of time with nobody giving the passengers any information. The word inevitably went round: “There are problems.” We could see people in boiler suits buzzing round the craft. Finally, one middle-aged Italian man succumbed to his internal pressures and did what we all felt like doing. He sprang out of his seat and determinedly made his way to the door. He was intercepted by a couple of stewards, and a scene followed. Eventually, he was persuaded that he could not possibly abandon the flight and leave his luggage behind in the hold (terrorist risk alert!), nor was the airline about to give instructions for all the luggage to be unloaded onto the runway, and for every passenger to troop out and identify his or her bags. I think if another 30 minutes had gone by, that man would have been followed to the door by the rest of us, and there would have been a mutinous exodus requiring the presence of large numbers of Carabinieri.

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The fact remains that we continue to fly, because the tiny risk percentage is far, far outweighed by the advantages. Of course, if you were absolutely determined to preserve your life at all costs, you would never fly. But then, you would never do other things, either. Living, naturally, entails the risk of sudden death, unless one spends all of one’s days walled up in a convent or monastery, death through boredom being apparently no more than a verbal expression, rather than a possibility in real life.

Many people have a thorough fear of flying which psychologists rank as a phobia. You can receive treatment for this kind of thing. But how do you cure a flight phobic when his or her fears are rooted in reality, only disproportionate to the risk? Those with flight phobia have had much these past few days to confirm them in their fears.

Getting on to a plane really requires a form of deep, blind faith that is roughly similar to the trust that small children have in their parents, or the religious in the tenets of their religion. I cannot help but pooh-pooh the inevitable statements made at times like this: that flying is one of the least risky forms of travel, that more people have died in car accidents than in plane accidents. Driving gives us a measure of control – or at least, the feeling of a measure of control – over whether we die or not. Bad driving might kill us; good driving probably won’t. We cannot factor in the bad driving of others – the drunken driver who crosses into oncoming traffic and dispatches us to eternal life, for instance – but behind the wheel, we don’t feel as terribly out of control of our own destiny as we do when strapped into a metal tube and flying several thousand kilometres above the earth. It doesn’t bear thinking about, which is why it helps that planes are not glass-bottomed, or glass-sided.