fear of flying

why the statistics don’t help

This is usually where it starts: friends say flying is safer than driving, you agree — and a minute later it has you again.

A phobia doesn’t argue with facts, because it isn’t about facts. The body is responding to other things: an enclosed space, the loss of control, unfamiliar noises, and the fact that you can’t leave. On top of that comes the bodily loop — breathing speeds up, carbon dioxide drops, your head goes light and your hands tingle, and the brain reads that as confirmation: something bad really is happening.

So arguing yourself out of it in the seat gets you nowhere. Interrupting the loop is another matter — that you can do.

what to do in the seat

The same things that work in any panic, adjusted for the cramped space and the stranger sharing your armrest.

The exhale longer than the inhale. That’s the main rule; everything else is detail. An ordinary breath in through the nose, an exhale twice as long, through slightly pursed lips — or just through the nose if you’d rather not be seen doing it.

An invisible rhythm, with no holds. In public the 2-1-4 pattern works well: in for two, a short pause, out for four. Seven seconds a cycle, and nothing shows from the outside.

Give your hands something to do. Hold something in your palm, open and close your fist in time with the exhale. Hands that are busy aren’t gripping the armrest.

Take-off and turbulence are the worst of it, and both end. Take-off lasts minutes and turbulence usually does too. Make a deal with yourself to breathe until the episode is over — until the seatbelt sign goes out.

If it tips over into an actual attack rather than fear, the mechanics and the order of things are set out in panic attack.

what those noises and that shaking are

Half the fear in the air comes from not knowing. An unfamiliar sound gets filed under "something is breaking", and the loop starts again. So, briefly.

Turbulence is uneven air, not a fault. It's uneven for ordinary reasons: warm ground sends up rising columns of air, wind speeds differ where two air masses meet, another aircraft leaves a wake behind it, airflow tumbles over mountains. The aircraft is travelling through that the way a car travels over a rough track: it shakes because the road is like that. Wings are built with a large margin over anything even heavy turbulence produces.

What turbulence does hurt is people standing in the aisle at the time — which is why they ask you to keep the belt fastened even once the sign goes off. Belted into your seat you're in the safest position available, and the crew change altitude or speed to get the ride smoother.

The sounds, in order. A few seconds after leaving the ground, a dull thump from below: the landing gear coming up. A minute or two later the engines get quieter — full take-off power is no longer needed and the thrust has been reduced. The aircraft keeps climbing, just more gently, and this is where passengers most often take fright. Before landing, a whine and a vibration: the flaps and the gear coming out. The separate whirring in between is hydraulics.

The least movement is over the wing: that's close to the aircraft's centre of gravity, the point it pivots around, while the tail is furthest from that point and swings most. "Sit away from the wing" turns up even on airline blogs, and it's back to front.

it matters what you’re breathing for

If you fly often, this part matters most — and almost nobody writes about it.

Psychotherapy has a name for the things a person does to protect themselves from what they fear: safety behaviours. For years anything in that category was taken to be harmful: it got in the way of finding out for yourself how the thing actually goes, so the fear stayed where it was.

A systematic review in 2016 sharpened that picture, and the correction is a practical one. What matters is not the action itself but whether it lets you meet the fear for real:

• if the thing you do helps you stay in the situation and live through it, exposure still does its work;
• if you use it to take the edge off the encounter, or it keeps you from engaging with the flight at all, it may weaken the effect.

On a plane, that means: breathing so that you can sit out the flight and notice that nothing happened is fine and useful. Breathing so that you don’t notice you’re flying at all is a way of arriving at the same fear next time. The difference is whether you let go of it once it gets easier.

There’s a rough gauge here, and it’s a gentle one. If after several flights you need the breathing more than you did the first time, that’s a conversation with a specialist rather than a reason to complicate the technique. And if you need about as much as you did at the start — you’re fine; some flights are simply harder than others.

what actually treats it

Breathing is first aid: it gets you through an episode in the seat. The phobia itself is worked on with a therapist, and that work goes well.

What works on phobias is exposure — meeting the thing you fear gradually, with a specialist guiding it, usually alongside cognitive behavioural therapy. Fear of flying has a particularly convenient version: exposure in virtual reality, where you “fly” in a consulting room.

The results there are encouraging, and one study measured them in an unusually checkable way: people were surveyed, and where they could, they backed the flights up with documents — boarding passes and tickets. Among those who had been through VR exposure, flights per month rose fourfold and flight hours by about the same.

Two caveats have to come with that. The study was retrospective and had no control group, so it shows an association; a design like that can’t prove an effect. And fewer than half of the people who were eligible agreed to take part — those for whom it didn’t work tend not to speak up.

If flying is part of your work or your life and the fear eats it whole, this is the case where seeing a specialist makes more sense than managing alone.

short answers