Fear of Flying: Introduction

How Did Your Discomfort with Flying Begin?

Some people have gradually become uncomfortable flying, and no particular event seems to have caused their problem. We're not certain why people might grow increasingly fearful as the years go by. Perhaps it's an issue of age, since the fear of flying begins at 27 years old on average. As we get older, many of us have a family we care about. If we are leaving our young children or a spouse behind when we fly, we may feel threatened or afraid that they'll be abandoned, that we will never see them again. It is those thoughts that may cause us to become more fearful. Or perhaps as we get older we pay more attention to the fragility of life, so that the older some people get, the more fearful they become. That fear can translate into a discomfort about flying.

You may not be able to pinpoint when your anxiety about flying began. Many people, though, can identify at least one of four different circumstances that contributed to their first problems with flying. These are:

• remembering a bad flight
• hearing scary stories about flying
• taking a flight while feeling nervous or claustrophobic
• traveling during a personally stressful phase in their life.

I will discuss each of these possibilities in the next few pages. See which ones seem to fit for you.

Common Causes of Fear of Flying

1. You had a difficult time during a previous flight
2. You reacted to stories you have heard
3. You developed other problems which increased your discomfort of flying
4. You had several months of stress prior to becoming uncomfortable

1. You had a difficult time during a previous flight
The vast majority of people who become uncomfortable flying never experience actual danger on a flight. This is because danger is rare in commercial aviation. Yet they become frightened while flying, which causes them to worry about future flights.

How do you define a frightening experience? It is any experience that your mind decides is frightening. Realistically it might not be a problem; there may be no threat to your life or health. Yet if you feel scared, you will remember the experience as a dangerous one.

Let's say you're taking a commercial flight, and the ride is smooth and calm. Then you see the seat belt light turn on, and the Captain announces, "Ladies and gentlemen, soon we will be approaching some choppy air. We would like everyone to return to their seats and fasten their seat belts." Simply hearing that there is going to be turbulence may make your heart race immediately. Even though the plane is safe, you end up feeling traumatized. That is, you were frightened, regardless of the real danger, and you felt out of control.

Whenever you think you are out of control, you will have fearful thoughts and your body will become tense. If that experience is frightening enough, you will become "conditioned" to it. This means that when you take flights in the future, you will begin to anticipate the possibility of turbulence again, and become anxious just thinking about it.

So if you have memories of past flights in which you felt uncomfortable, and those memories come back to you easily, this can be at least partly responsible for your current discomfort.

2. You reacted to stories you have heard
You can also develop discomfort simply by hearing about someone else's problem. We call this "vicarious" learning. You hear about another person's experience, and then imagine yourself having that same experience. We have clear examples of this phenomenon in the airline industry. Vicarious fears develop with every airplane accident we hear about. People will imagine what it would have been like for them if they had been aboard that particular plane.

If your mind rehearses a traumatic event in imagery, your body will react to it almost as though it were happening in reality, and you will feel anxious. What if you then predict that it might occur when you next fly? ("Hey, it happened to that plane. That means it could happen to my plane!") You will likely get more anxious and associate that anxiety with your next flight. It can be as simple as that.

Fearful fliers often look for data to reinforce their anxieties. They tend to ignore articles that talk about safety and how much the airline industry has improved in the past two decades. Instead, they seek out the articles discussing any possible danger or threat in the industry. This is a way people contribute to their own discomfort. They continue to gather evidence that supports their fearful position, while ignoring any data to the contrary.