Jaunt in Jasper

Our last first page comes from Kristen Smith - Thank-you! - a contemporary romance tentatively called, JAUNT IN JASPER. My comments will be in purple and I hope you'll add yours :)

 Tara Stevens’ honey beige L’Oreal Paris foundation couldn’t hide the paleness (this suggests an omniscient narrator. If you are going for close third person, I wouldn't include details like this as people don't notice how pale they are unless they look in a mirror) that swept over her face when she realized the terminal to her plane was a staircase leading down to the tarmac. Thirty feet away was the smallest plane she had ever seen with two classic propellers on either wing screaming antique. Wasn’t there an advanced twenty-first century reason why every other plane she’d ever been on had jet engines? 
    As she climbed up the pull-down staircase and peered through the plane’s door, her jaw dropped. This plane was too small. Much too small. The tiny interior only large enough to house one row of seats, then an aisle, then two more rows of seats. Amazingly enough, she had an aisle AND a window seat. Which did not give her a good feeling.
    She hated to fly. As a local Richmond lawyer, she rarely flew for work, but each time she did, she hated it. She despised everything about it--taxiing down the runway, small talk with strangers, cramped quarters, nasty airline food she actually had to pay to eat.
     Then there was the one thing she hated the most about flying. The thing that set her nerves on edge and wrapped fear around her heart. Landing. Landing was the worst. She always pictured the plane spinning out of control as the wheels hit the tarmac. It’s giant belly sliding along the concrete until it burst into flames. It didn’t help her already delicate state when the brakes made a thunderous noise like the plane was about to explode at any second. No, that didn’t help her nerves at all.
    She sucked in air as she tried to calm those nerves. The pilot’s voice came on over the loudspeaker announcing their departure. Tara pictured him and his buddy hanging out in the front of the plane, sipping a latte, perfectly at ease, while she was about to have a coronary in the middle of the two-prop plane. She glanced out the window. Just her luck to be seated right beside the left propeller. As the blades started to move, picking up speed and slicing through the air, Tara’s hands gripped her arm rests until her knuckles turned white. (Here's another spot where you need to be clear about your pov. Do you want to say, Tara's hands gripped or Tara gripped? Do you see the difference?) She pictured tiny sparks flying off the propellers once they were four thousand feet in the sky. Why, oh why, did she have to get the seat next to the turbines?
    She thought back to the reason she was in this mess in the first place. Her husband Jack. Oh, he was a jack alright. A jack-off, jerk face, no good, good for nothin’, piece of shi-ite. There weren’t enough vile adjectives in the thesaurus to describe what he was. Detestable, abhorrent, disgusting, dishonorable, abominable, loathsome--those were a few that immediately came to mind. But the best one. Philandering snake.

My first question is, is Tara's fear of flying important? If so then this is all fine - although I might cut it shorter -  but if not then I'd just briefly show she doesn't like flying and move on to what's really happening, like where is she going? What sort of mess is she in? How did she get there? That's what I want to know. I don't care that she hates flying (unless there's going to be a plane crash...) but I do want to know what Tara's situation is and how she got there. What else is she feeling beneath the fear of flying? 

Those are my thoughts about this first page and I hope you' chime in with yours :)