IN THE COURSE of my work as a journalist, and occasionally in the course of avoiding it, I have flown around the world four times and exchanged unpleasantries with immigration and customs officials on six continents. The memories of it all leave me fervently wishing that the Wright Brothers had stuck to peddling bicycle chains.

On my list of jolly ways to pass the time, air travel ranks marginally behind bungee jumping down a 175-foot well and giving myself a pre-frontal lobotomy with a plastic spatula. The Almighty left no doubt about His own feelings on the issue when he installed wings on flies.

This flying brouhaha has been bestirred by the arrival of warm weather for its annual two- or three-day stay in Britain and my wife Elizabeth's insistence that this time we spend a vacation somewhere farther afield than 75 miles from London. Like Ireland, maybe. Like forget it, is my response.

I've nothing in particular against Ireland. It seems a pleasant enough place, and the locals do a nice line in Oirish folk songs and turn out reasonably decent poteen with their stills, even if they are useless as potato farmers.

The difficulty is that I live in a land of ancient castles, warm beer and medieval plumbing - but more to the immediate point, one surrounded entirely by water. Britain is an island nation, there are only a limited number of ways - three, to be precise - of getting off the place, and they are all fraught with problems.

One is by land, or rather, via a hole through it beneath the English Channel called the Eurotunnel, where trains run from London to Paris or, if you take a really wrong turn, to Brussels. A rail buff's dream, perhaps; a claustrophobe's nightmare.

I number myself firmly among the army of foot soldiers of the latter - rubbery-kneed types for whom even the Trans World Dome lacks sufficient elbow and breathing room, let alone a tin tube full of garlicky Frenchies and waffle-munching Belgiques being propelled clickity-clack through a 19-mile hole buried a few feet beneath several zillion tons of seawater.

Another, even less satisfactory, method of escape from this Scept'r'd Isle is via boat. In the first place, I haven't forgotten that unfortunate business involving the Titanic, and I've no great desire to go to a watery grave with the screeching tones of Celine Dion gurgling in my ears.

In the second - and much more important - place, I get queasy just from staring too long at a tumbler of fizzy water. I had to turn off my artificial wave machine after six minutes and I had to flee a Chicago theater after spending even less time watching the ships in the movie "Windjammer" sailing across the wide screen, up and down, up and down. . .

Which leaves flying. Which is just what I have done, and will continue to do until the aforementioned Almighty decides I would make a neat horsefly.

To those who say knowledge overcomes all, I say they are full of it, and ignorance is bliss, and when it comes to flying, the most ghastly mistake I ever made was learning how.

Instead of hanging onto the bar at the Escape Velocity Press Club, I let my good pal Bob Button talk me into going out to LaPorte Airport, just outside Houston, and climbing into a contraption made of canvas stretched over a few oversized toothpicks. The second big mistake was not climbing out two minutes later and walking away from airplanes forever.

The contraption was a Piper Something-Or-Other, and suddenly I was on my way to becoming a licensed pilot. It was chocks away, and at the helm of a Cessna-150 with the call sign 7972Z, I plotted a course to Waco, Texas, and was well on my way toward Acapulco until Air Traffic Control inquired as to what I thought I was doing anyway.

On another occasion, I had to buzz a water tower to find out whether I was over Lubbock, Texas, or Baton Rouge. A buddy and I flying ourselves to Cape Canaveral managed to get trapped between two towering thunderheads over the Florida Panhandle with a busted radio, escaping only by driving our tiny flivver through the front edge of a squall line.

The absolute nadir of all this was the broiler-hot day that I climbed into the cockpit of a Comanche 150 and endeavored to make my way from Chicago's waterfront Meigs Field back to Houston. The task was complicated by the presence of a sizable hangover and the absence of the flight charts I had left behind at the hotel.

What I did have was an Esso roadmap of the eastern United States, which enabled me to find the Mississippi River. The compass told me where south was. En route, when the propeller quit propelling, a couple of lucky guesses got me to a map dot called Walnut Grove, Arkansas, for fuel to add to the couple of ounces I had left in the tip-tanks.

These misadventures persuaded me that flying was for the birds. But it was ground school that convinced me that airplanes belong in the same category as English-made hot dogs, the Jerry Springer Show and ex-wives - to be avoided at all costs. It is there that they teach you all the things that can go wrong.

Starting with ice in the Pitot tubes (don't ask) to letting mountains get in the way, the list is an imposing one. It was a news conference after a jetliner crashed into a mountain in Alaska that did it for me. A pesky reporter topped his list of embarrassing questions with: "Just exactly what happened?"

To which the exasperated airline spokesman replied succinctly, "The plane stopped. The passengers didn't."

I did toy with the idea of taking one of those "flying without fear" courses they run for aerophobes - until Virgin Atlantic notified another terrified air traveler that its own course had been canceled because the pilot, Captain Norman Lees, had been killed in a flying accident.

I don't think this is exactly what Orville and Wilbur had in mind when they went frightening the crabs down at Kitty Hawk.

Thought for the Week: A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.

"Notes From A Tangled Webb" is syndicated by: