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It was 28th July 2024. My flight from Bengaluru was running late, which meant we would land in Mumbai well after dark, in the middle of the monsoon, which is the worst combination of things a flight into Mumbai can be.
I knew this before I boarded. I have flown this route many times. I know what a Mumbai monsoon landing feels like, and I know the statistics on commercial aviation, and I know that turbulence has killed almost no one in the modern era of flying. I am, by any reasonable measure, an informed passenger and understand a bit about how a commercial aircraft is designed to handle forces several times greater than anything it will ever actually encounter in the air.
None of it helped.
The first drop came somewhere over the Western Ghats. The seatbelt sign turned back on. The cabin crew, who had been halfway through the meal service, were told to return to their seats. I noticed myself doing the thing every nervous passenger does, which is to look at the faces of the cabin crew as they walked back, to see if they looked worried. They did not look worried. I have never once, in two decades of flying, seen a cabin crew member look worried, and I have still never been reassured by it.
Then we descended into the cloud, and the windows went grey, then darker grey, then nothing at all except the wing light blinking through sheets of rain. The plane began to move in the way planes move when the air itself is moving. My hand was on the armrest.
I was reciting the statistics to myself by then. But none of it was reaching the part of me that needed reaching.
We broke through the cloud layer late. And there, suddenly, was the city of Mumbai. The Jari Mari hills on one side. The endless spread of Kurla and Sakinaka beneath us, the slums covered in those blue plastic tarpaulins that everyone in Mumbai uses against the monsoon. The runway was somewhere in front of us, but I could not see it. Just the blue tarpaulins and the rain and the very low altitude and the unmistakable sense that we were almost at the ground and I still did not know whether the ground in front of us was the runway or the slum.
I remember thinking, very clearly, that I did not know whether the pilot was going to land inside the airport or outside it. I remember thinking about the wet runway, about whether the plane would skid, about how short the runway at Mumbai feels when it is raining and the brakes have to work harder than usual. None of these were rational thoughts. They were the thoughts of a passenger whose mind had run out of statistics and was now just generating fears in the order it could think of them.
The wheels touched the ground with a loud roar. The plane slowed. We were on the runway. The pilot had known exactly where the runway was. I had assumed that because I could not see it, he couldn’t either, which is one of the more humbling things a passenger can admit about themselves.
There was the small collective exhale in the cabin that always follows a hard monsoon landing. Strangers briefly looking at each other. The man across the aisle smiled at me. I smiled back. We had survived something together, except that we had not actually survived anything, because nothing had ever been wrong.
A pilot friend once told me that the thing pilots are actually trained to fear is not weather. It is not turbulence. It is not even lightning, which sounds dramatic and is mostly harmless to a modern aircraft. In fact, according to the IATA Annual Safety Report, turbulence-related fatalities on large commercial jets are statistically near zero. It’s a sensory nightmare, but a structural non-event.
The thing pilots are trained to fear has a clinical name: Controlled Flight Into Terrain (CFIT).
It’s when a perfectly functioning aircraft, flown by a competent crew, is flown directly into the ground, a mountain, or the sea. The Boeing Statistical Summary of Commercial Jet Accidents consistently identifies CFIT as one of the deadliest categories in aviation history, accounting for roughly 20% of all fatal accidents. So, it’s not the breaking plane, but the “chain of human decisions” inside the cockpit that fail to account for the ground that cause a lot of aviation fatalities.
The history of aviation is haunted by these moments. It is the story of American Airlines 965, where a hurried crew typed a single wrong letter into a navigation computer and flew a perfect Boeing 757 into a mountain. It is Thai Airways 311, where the pilots became so distracted by a minor technical glitch during a monsoon approach that they lost track of their heading entirely.
In these cases, the ‘weather’ was just the backdrop. The catastrophe was born from a small chain of human decisions that made sense in the moment, but led the plane exactly where it wasn’t supposed to go.
I have been an investor for over 23 years, and I have watched a lot of people get destroyed by the stock market. Almost none of them were destroyed by the “weather” they were worried about.
They weren’t destroyed by politicians, the central bank, some war, or the recession that everyone has been predicting for two years. They were destroyed by the small chain of decisions they had made in calm weather, when no one was paying attention, that left them with no margin when the weather inevitably turned.
It may be the leverage they took on in the good year, when the returns felt guaranteed and the downside felt theoretical. It may be the position they let grow too large because it kept going up, and the discipline of trimming it began to feel like punishment for being right. Or it may be the plan they abandoned because the plan felt unnecessary in a market that only seemed to go in one direction.
And then the crash, when it came, just revealed what was already broken.
This is the thing I have been refusing to learn, and I think it is the thing most investors refuse to learn. I think the reason we all refuse to learn it is the same reason I sat in my turbulent aircraft seat reciting statistics to myself that I already knew.
We would rather be afraid of the weather than afraid of ourselves. It’s because when you are afraid of the weather, you are part of a community of frightened people, all of you reading the same headlines, all of you watching the same television channels, all of you texting each other the same anxious questions about what the central bank will do next. There is a comfort in this. You are not alone with your fear.
But the decisions that will actually destroy you are not made in that community. They are made alone, in front of a screen, in a moment when no one is watching and no one will ever know what you chose. There is no community for that. Nobody retweets a well-sized position. Nobody high-fives you for the investment you did not make. The work that actually matters in investing is solitary in a way that almost nothing else in modern life is solitary, and I think most of us would rather do almost anything than sit alone with it.
I know all of this, and I have known it for years. And I am telling you, with some embarrassment, that knowing it has not stopped me from doing it. I still sometimes flinch at the headlines. I still sometimes find myself scanning the news for an explanation of something that does not need an explanation, looking for company in my fear rather than sitting quietly with the only question that has ever actually mattered, which is whether I made the small decisions well in the calm weather, before any of this began.
What 23 years has taught me is not that the fear goes away. It did not go away on the flight from Bengaluru and it does not go away when the market falls and I no longer believe it is supposed to.
What 23 years has taught me is something more useful, which is that the fear is almost always pointed at the wrong thing, and that the slow, long work of becoming a better investor is mostly the work of noticing where you are looking when the fear arrives, and asking whether that is where the plane actually goes down.
It almost never is.
The next time the market drops and you feel your stomach drop with it, you do not have to make the feeling go away. You will not be able to anyway. You only have to notice, for a moment, where you are looking. And then ask yourself, very quietly, whether the plane has ever actually gone down there.
P.S. If this essay resonated with you, you may find my new book The Long Game useful. It is a hardcover collection of reflections from 30 investing practitioners on what it actually takes to stay the course over decades. You can find it here.
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