[Max Cow Disease]

Many people also think that the act of an airplane flying through the air is much more of a tight rope walk than it actually is, as though the jolts felt during turbulence could toss the plane off balance and out of the air all of the sudden. If there's airspeed, you're flying, and it is certainly very akin to the fluid properties of something like driving a boat on a lake, as someone mentioned. Aircraft also come packaged with a "rough air penetration" speed to which most pilots will slow in the event of significant turbulence. At this speed, the airplane is engineered to take a shellacking.

It sounds cliched, but the road's a far scarier place to be than the air generally...even when an item or two flies about the cabin.