Are you afraid of aeroplanes?

I have done a lot of traveling so far in my life.
I live in Greece, was born in Germany and have studied in the U.K.
I have virtually travelled through the best part of Europe and the majority of the countries in the continent.

It never occurred to me that there is still nowadays a vast number of people afraid of travelling by plane.
There was a period of about 8 years between 1995-2003 that i chose flight as my preferred mode of commuting and i flew up and down forth and back about 12 times a year. I certainly preferred aeroplanes compared to buses. Space was more convenient and the value of time and discomfort relative to buses was incomparable.

So taking into account that i am quite a crazy lively and daring person it never occurred to me that there was a significant percentage of people afraid of flight....

One might assume that today in the modern age this wouldn't be an issue anymore.

However to my great surprise coincidence has shown me that there is an issue.

I have met plenty of people lately talking with me and seeking advice on how to travel. At first i thought there was an exclusion but as months have come by i have noticed a trend or a pattern of people being afraid to travel by plane.

In fact many have chosen to travel by boat and then use cars trains buses etc to arrive to their required/desired destination. How inconvinient i thought but after giving it some more thought i sympathised with them.

If you asked me, having a choice and plenty of time i would use a car to stroll along routes spicing up the trip. However that is not the subject of this thread and really is inconvenient practically...

So summing up, i decided to make this thread and see your feelings and views on the subject.

If the attendance is high enough i might go ahead and make some pie diagrams so we can have a bigger picture of this phenomenon.

Take care

GEORGE TG

[edit on 5/5/2009 by GEORGETHEGREEK]

I always imagined people are afraid of flight for two major reasons...

1. Media coverage of plane crashes makes it look unsafe, the indepth footage of crash sites and the rerolling over and over again of the accident makes it look profound.

2. You are not in control of the flight, therefor whatever occurs allows you to simply be a passanger to your death/injury. Car drivers find it comforting that they at least have some control.

my two cents =)

reply to post by GEORGETHEGREEK


No matter what people say, it's far safer than the drive to the airport. In my life I have been on well over 100 flights without incidence, flights as short as 1 hour, or as much as 22 hours (australia, wow that flight sucked)

Peoples fear of flying is simply another way they let the Media dictate their life.

Hey

There is a 3rd point:

You sit high up there only into a little metal-box. (there the 2nd point comes: you have no control over it). And there is only air under your feets.

guess i hate flying

Nia

i've never flown, not afraid of flying, but am afraid of how i will land.

Though it is the most efficient means of travel to most locations, I absolutely despise flying. It's getting worse and worse every time. It is to the point where I have panic attacks now. After being stuck in a holding pattern flying around San Antonio / Corpus Christi for hours being unable to land due to weather, I'm pretty sure I will never set foot on a plane again. In addition, it seems whenever I fly anywhere I wind up getting sick with some type of infection and it seems that's fairly common. Yuck. From now on, I will drive around the US

Maybe people don't want to go through the rigamarole of airport security?
Body scanners, random strip-searches, etc......?

I can't believe I will be sharing this information but here goes. I was offered a business trip to fly to a different state (Here in Texas to South Carolina). At first I wasn't reluctant to do so, but after a few weeks passing and the trip coming on I couldn't help but fear the plane ride. I have always been ghostly afraid of heights. Once at a hotel on the 29th story I spent the majority of it ill in the bathroom and being so nervous it made me literally sick. I just got a weird feeling being that high. I try to avoid high places after that fact, so pretty much an airplane ride and knowing how high up you are would not go for a pretty sight. So I cancelled my trip and have since cancelled a lot of opportunities to go fly because I am afraid of being that high in the air or how I would feel being so high, and not being able to stop it.

I was cabin crew, married a pilot and my two daughters are now pilots. Even years ago there were classes held by the airlines for "fear of flying". I think it has always been ...a bit like arachnaphobia. I must admit as I have got older...I do sometimes get some fear from flying but I put that down to knowing too much.

reply to post by Cds4344


I appreciate you sharing that! You're not alone in these fears. I too have a terrible generalized fear of heights. I have trouble even being a few stories up. During the same trip where I was stuck in that plane, I experienced something similar to what you were talking about. I was in a hotel room on the 3rd floor and I was afraid to go on my balcony. When I went out there to smoke, I actually had to keep pressed up against the wall so I wouldn't be near the railings. It seems my phobia with this has been getting progressively worse the past few years. It really just stinks because it's completely irrational. I KNOW that most likely nothing will happen but the feelings I get are indescribable, it's truly awful.

Originally posted by king9072
reply to post by GEORGETHEGREEK

 

No matter what people say, it's far safer than the drive to the airport. In my life I have been on well over 100 flights without incidence, flights as short as 1 hour, or as much as 22 hours (australia, wow that flight sucked)

Peoples fear of flying is simply another way they let the Media dictate their life.

I take issue with people that say you're more likely to get into a car crash than a plane crash... That may be true, but, barring a pilot who makes a heroic landing in the Hudson River, you're more far more likely to survive a car crash. In my opinion, it has nothing to do with the media, and everything to do with the lack of control. Turbulence can be a living nightmare for someone who's uncomfortable with flying.

reply to post by king9072


I'd have to disagree with your statement. Nothing in the media "dictated" my decision, its a pure factor fear of heights and how one's body reacts to such situations....

I am fascinated by flight, and I spend a lot of time piloting radio-controlled planes, helicopters, and UFOs. You won't see me learning to pilot a real aircraft, however, and I haven't flown since well before 9/11.

I wouldn't say I'm inordinately afraid of flying, but I do feel that oft-repeated cliche about air travel being safer than driving is just hogwash.

Sure, if you're compiling statistics according to miles covered, air travel may look a lot safer. But what if you change the metric you're tracking and compare fatalities per hour spent on the road, vs. fatalities per hour spent in the air?

Better yet, let's compare fatalities per auto collision, vs. fatalities per air disaster.

In fact, how 'bout if we look at fatalities per automotive engine failure, vs. fatalities per aircraft engine failure?

Traveling by car is infinitely safer than flying, because if you suffer a complete automotive systems failure, the worst thing that happens is you wind up on the side of the road waiting for a tow-truck. Even if you really mess up while behind the wheel, the worst thing you have to fear in most cases is an air-bag exploding in your face and a costly trip to the body shop.

With airplanes, any unforeseen gust of wind, equipment failure, or bad decision on the part of the flight crew can mean certain doom, 'cause you just don't have much margin of error when you're defying gravity.

I just have a quiet moment with the machine spirit of the plane and say "you're so strong I bet you could fly through a hurricane!"

Then it's all good.

[edit on 5-5-2009 by miragezero]

Originally posted by Ihniwid
I always imagined people are afraid of flight for two major reasons...

1. Media coverage of plane crashes makes it look unsafe, the indepth footage of crash sites and the rerolling over and over again of the accident makes it look profound.

2. You are not in control of the flight, therefor whatever occurs allows you to simply be a passanger to your death/injury. Car drivers find it comforting that they at least have some control.

my two cents =)

I give you one you do not have.
I've been an Engineer for 27 years. I've been in Aerospace for the last 15years. I will not fly! No way in hell.
If the maintaince isn't bad enough, then working with some of the people that I do would be enough.
I am serious, I will not fly anymore, period.

Roger that. Required reading for all air travelers:

The Unfriendly Skies: An Aviation Watergate, by Rodney Stitch.

It might be out-of-print, but there are places on the Web, including Amazon, where you can find used and OOP books. The things that book reveal about the FAA and the airline industry are horrifying.

Maybe some of the criminal negligence the author describes might have been addressed in the last couple of decades, but who knows?

One thing that should give anybody pause is the starting salaries for pilots. The airlines all take advantage of the fact that there are always young, new pilots who are so eager to fly that they'll do it practically for free. I don't know about the rest of you, but if I'm putting my life in somebody's hands, I'd like to think he's being paid more than a school teacher or the kid working the drive-through window at Burger King.

Originally posted by flightsuit
Sure, if you're compiling statistics according to miles covered, air travel may look a lot safer. But what if you change the metric you're tracking and compare fatalities per hour spent on the road, vs. fatalities per hour spent in the air?

Yes, fatalities on air vs on road with regards to hours spent, will definitely make flying a lot more dangerous.

And hey, look at this. Our longevity is determined by years, hence time, not the distance we travelled. So in the absolute sense, flying is more dangerous.

But good for me, I'm not afraid of dying Also love the sensation of speed and the spectacular view at high altitudes.

Airplanes look scary though if crashing in a neighborhood or any populated place

[edit on 5-5-2009 by ahnggk]

Originally posted by flightsuit
Roger that. Required reading for all air travelers:

The Unfriendly Skies: An Aviation Watergate, by Rodney Stitch.

It might be out-of-print, but there are places on the Web, including Amazon, where you can find used and OOP books. The things that book reveal about the FAA and the airline industry are horrifying.

Maybe some of the criminal negligence the author describes might have been addressed in the last couple of decades, but who knows?

One thing that should give anybody pause is the starting salaries for pilots. The airlines all take advantage of the fact that there are always young, new pilots who are so eager to fly that they'll do it practically for free. I don't know about the rest of you, but if I'm putting my life in somebody's hands, I'd like to think he's being paid more than a school teacher or the kid working the drive-through window at Burger King.

Your last paragraph is partially right in that the young pilots will accept a low salary in order to gain hours and keep their license current ...having said that they the training to become a "commercial pilot" is very rigorous with many hours in ground school before they are even let loose in an aircraft. Plus the many hours spent in simulators where any gungho attitude would soon be thrashed out of them. I have faith in pilots but as one engineer has already said...the maintenance of the aircraft can be brought into question as some airlines make dangerous cutbacks.

I wouldn't say that I'm afraid of flying, its more so that I'm afraid of being 35,000 feet in the air, and then suddenly NOT flying.

As mentioned previously in this thread, I think alot of the fear of flying stems from the fact that you're not in control of the situation. And more to that point, if something did go wrong, you have absolutely no idea what to do. You're putting yourself in a situation where you're completely at the mercy of things that are totally outside of your control. To me, thats pretty scary.

I've only flown twice before, round trip. The takeoff and landing are for me the scariest part of the flight. Once you're actually at cruising altitude, there's not much you can do but sit back and pretend to enjoy the ride. I personally slept as much of the flight as possible.

Thinking back now, what was probably the scariest part of the flight, was about an 45 minutes from our destination, still at cruising altitude, 30k feet or so, sitting looking out the window, I saw another plane fly by. I only saw it for a few seconds, as it appeared out of a cloud bank, and then into another, and I'm sure since I had nothing to reference the distance off of, it appeared alot closer than it actually was, to me it still seemed far to close for safety.

I am deadly scared of flying, now I'll admit, part of it is that sitting in a metal tube 30,000 feet in the air just doesn't sound like an all together good idea to me.

BUT my main problem is one that is already pointed out, lack of control. As it is, I will not fly, however if you put me in the pilots seat, even if I had no knowledge of what I was doing and having it talked to me by someone else, I could manage that, but sitting in a seat somewhere that high in the sky, with absolutely no control over anything. That I can not do.