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Comment by nkrisc | Hacker News Reader

I know perfectly well that a fear of flying is often an irrational, though very real, fear for many people. But it's exactly the irrational nature of it that boggles my mind: they should be terrified of driving, but they aren't.

I'm way more comfortable flying than driving.

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I tried to find the stats on this and haven't found the right ones yet. There are odds of dying in a lifetime, which is flawed because people drive more than they fly. There's also deaths per mile, which isn't right because planes go faster than cars. It seems that what people care about is what is the probability of dying in a time period of engaging in the activity?

Are there stats for driver-deaths-per-time-spent-driving? It'd also be interesting if it could be broken down to driver-deaths that 100% clearly weren't the driver's fault. I wonder how that compares to deaths-per-time-flying (via a major carrier). Or probability of death.

Best I could find is the micromort wikipedia page [1] - apparently to spend one micromort, you can drive 230 miles, fly 1000 miles, or train 6000 miles. Looked at that way, you're burning micromorts at a faster hourly rate on the plane, so according to that it's riskier if you squint your eyes just so.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort

Hmm.

If I'm reading that page right myself, then if you travel 1000 miles in a car there's ~4.3 times as much risk of death than if you travelled in a plane instead.

So if a plane travels at least 4.3 times as FAST as a car on average, then your risk over time in a plane could be higher.

I think your post makes a good point in general. Way too often, people compare statistics that don't consider major factors like how often people drive vs. fly.

Couldn't you just divide the deaths per mile by the typical speed of an airplane or car to normalize the data?

That's probably a good first approximation, genuinely wonder about how accurate it gets. How many people die in LA gridlock?

If your driving experience is "hours moving at 5mph", and your flying is "lots of shaking", easy to get scared of one.

As someone who has developed a fear of flying (I still fly because I'm not taking a boat but...), one small thing that scares me is looking at plane wings in flight.

A lot of bending, and a lot of parts that look old. On one flight I could see a piece of rubber stuck on the rudder , that seemed to slowly get more worn out as the rudder moved up and down.

I'm sure it was by design, but at the time, I was legitimately scared.

EDIT: it was a flap, not a rudder

Modern aircraft have engineering tolerances that are absolutely absurd: http://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/g2428/7-airplane-wing...

The shake and wobble in wings is by design. If they didn't flex they'd shatter.

People have a place they want to go when they travel, so deaths per passenger mile is much more relevant than deaths per hour. Otherwise you could reduce your risk of being in a car accident by driving really fast and spending less time driving!

When you go to visit someone or to an event, the place is fixed. When you plan a vacation, travel time is a factor (certainly not the only one)

As another commenter said, for me it's about my personal lack of control over the outcome -- that you're completely at the whim of others (the pilots, the maintenance crew, air traffic control, etc.), which compares unfavorably with the illusion of control one has with driving.

Traffic fatalities do occur to people who were not 'at-fault', and despite there being lots of good statistics on driving accidents [1][2], I can't any good ones on the ratio of serious injury or death for non-"at-fault" drivers vs. at-fault ones.

Meanwhile, it would be illuminating to interview people who never drive themselves -- rather, they are always passengers -- whether they feel safer being driven, vs. flying, and the like.

[1] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/#/ [2] http://www.iii.org/issue-update/auto-crashes

While I get that, it's a little odd to have that "illusion of control" in a situation where a legally blind 90 year old with mild dementia might well be barreling down the wrong way of the highway towards you.

Others downthread have mentioned it, but you still have an element of control in that situation. I've seen someone driving down the wrong side of the highway, and I pulled my car over and didn't get hit.

Even if the % of control you personally have is small, as long as it's > 0%, you feel like you're in control of the situation. In a plane, it's 0%.

Sometimes. There are situations where you're going to have no real options. A drunk driver could sideswipe you into a pole with zero warning.

The chances of your plane running into another plane piloted by a drunk is pretty slim in comparison.

True. But in a car, it typically takes 2 people doing something wrong for a wreck to occur. I prefer to give myself a chance and be one of those with a choice, and to be able to train myself, and so on. On a plane, it's outside of my control. Furthermore, the failure is much more likely to be mechanical, and often at that point there's nothing anyone can do, even with the best-trained pilot in the world. So many people (maintenance personnel for instance) have to do their job well to keep the plane in the sky.

I also have almost no fear of being in a car wreck because I still find it highly unlikely a wreck would kill or seriously injure me. I have a safe car and have lost (and regained!) control of cars plenty of times in my life without incident. Hell, I even choose to race cars in circle for fun! I only fly because I HAVE to.

Motorcycles obviously feel more dangerous to me and I have greater reservations whenever I ride one.

Ironically, I am posting this from a UA flight.

I was once on a flight that lost an engine. That was fun. We took a "normal single-engined" tour of LA, and a "normal single-engined landing" 45 minutes later. The lack of concern was both reassuring and terrifying. I expected the pilots to spin the plane on a dime and drop it back down the runway the same way we came, emergency landing, rather than keep the thing flying on one engine.

If you're just after any % so you can have a semblance of illusion of control, you could always spend some time researching safest seating positions in planes, how to position ones self to change direction in a free fall, and ideal landing terrain.

Your ability to influence outcome in a plane accident are minuscule but they do technically exist.

Yes, as an anxious flier/safety obsessive I do this. I would say they are actually more significant than you would estimate. Even catastrophic crashes can be survivable, and most crashes are not the plane falling completely out of the sky but rather mishaps around takeoff or landing at slower speeds and involving fire-related fatalities on the ground.

Here's a list of things you can do to increase your personal safety while flying:

* Sit as close as possible to an emergency exit.

* RTF(safety)M

* Know how to assume a brace position, including ideally the particular brace position which is optimal for your body shape/size in your given seat.

* If you're particularly paranoid like me, you can preemptively assume the brace position on takeoff and final approach/landing. Full disclosure: I don't have any evidence that this is beneficial and people may think you're crazy, so there's that, but it makes me feel better.

* Wear sneakers and keep them on or at least in reach at all times.

* Wear layers, preferably made from less flammable materials.

* Don't be intoxicated. I break this rule by having some drinks to ease my anxiety, but the point is to not get to anywhere near the point of incapacitation.

Interesting - I never drive myself and I feel far more nervous about being in a car than my driver friends. I think there'd be confounding factors about who drives though. Perhaps you want to measure whether people who sometimes drive feel a significantly different level of safety when driving or being driven?

Nervous flyer here.

I tell myself this on a loop while flying and my lizard brain just does not care. Weirdly, I've flown hundreds of times and this didn't start until I was near 30.

I think one aspect is not the fear of death, but the fear of being in a situation of knowing death is certain for minutes as you fall out of the sky. (Which is a situation I also know is a small fraction of the already tiny chance of dying in an airplane).

Completely agree with you. I fly tons for work, and was just fine until I got into my mid-late twenties when I started to have horrible anxiety.

And like you, I don't necessarily fear death, but I definitely don't want to see death coming. More than anything, I fear helplessness.

When I was a teen (long time ago) I remember telling my dad that I thought it would be great to take a flight with many stops because that way we got to takeoff and land multiple times! What fun! A bit later of course it became exactly the opposite and not just for time travel reasons, price or schedule.

Ditto. Was traveling for a living, and didn't care at all about it for years, then I got worse and worse, and had to change careers. I think part of it was the increase in stress overall after 9/11 in travelling, but maybe another part of it is doing it enough times, having enough unpleasant experiences that it's added up to me just hating everything that can happen on a typical flight.

Also, dropping 10-20 feet and seeing/feeling the frame of the aircraft flexing about is just plain unsettling.

> dropping 10-20 feet and seeing/feeling the frame of the aircraft flexing about is just plain unsettling.

If it helps, Boeing tests the wings to failure by mounting them to a diabolical torture device that bends them. They have to be bent near vertical before failure.

A little turbulence flapping the wings is about as dangerous as your car's suspension flexing over rough roads.

Have you tried taking a flight lesson to see if it helps?

I used to be a white knuckle flyer until working at Boeing. Knowing how the systems are designed and how they work and how they are designed to be resistant to failure helped a great deal.

I tried to explain all this to a friend who was also a nervous nellie flyer, and he told me he didn't want to know - he felt safer with it being a black box.

It's weird how the brain works.

I know very well that airliners are safe, and I'm aware just how much work goes every day to ensure they stay safe. And yet, every time I'm flying, I have this uncontrollable thought, "maybe this is the day we all crash and die". I always get a little anxious during takeoff and landing, I listen to all the noises and worry about them. "This doesn't make sense, the plane didn't usually make that sound". "Oh shit, the lights blinked, wiring must be damaged." Stuff like that. It usually takes me few minutes after liftoff to get those thoughts out of my head.

At least for me there's a feeling of autonomy. If a plane crashes, there's very little that I as a non-superman can do to stop that from happening (with me inside it.) While driving, I can trust my own reflexes, awareness, and decision making to put myself in better or worse situations. Now this may still absolutely be a false perception, but this is where the feeling is rooted for me (from lengthy introspection on similar situations when I used to do trick-skiing and never really questioned my safety, but would be very hesitant to e.g. skydive).

To some degree I think it's potentially also "failure magnitudes." Having been in a handful of very minimal car crashes, that calibrates my "something goes bad" prior to a not very impactful bar; whereas if something goes wrong on a plane, it can go VERY VERY wrong. Again, this is likely a false perception due to observations of outlier events in both cases and sparsity of signal, I'm just trying to question the origin of my feelings.

There's this thing that will happen to me when I doze off as a passenger in a car: When I wake up, there's often a split second of panic between the visceral understanding that I'm in a moving vehicle and the slightly delayed recollection that I'm not the one responsible for driving it.

Somehow, this turned into a problem for me when flying (even though I'm not a pilot). I wake up, I instantly know I'm moving at 500 miles per hour through the air, then I have a singular panic of being in a vehicle not under my control. This has only happened once – I haven't slept on a plane since.

Speaking of irrational, when flying I think, "What if this is the day I discover my superpower to walk through objects and fall to the earth." I think that's about as irrational as I can get for a fear.

Curious phobia! Do you imagine yourself disintegrating on the surface of the earth or do you continue to fall through it?

Hah yeah. I have no idea why I think of that in planes. I assume it would even be worse on ground level, fall into the bedrock and never come back up.

It must be something from my childhood and stories or TV shows, and just stuck with me. I know I had recurring dreams when I was young, a futuristic belt that let me jump through walls, but detected and kept me on the floor without falling through.

It's about feeling that you are in control. You do not have control when you are flying because you are not a pilot. You are giving control over your safety and life to other people. When you drive a car you have a feeling that everything is under your control (which is not true most of the time).

I'm sorry, but if I'm in a tin can 30,000 feet in the air, defying gravity, I'm going to freak out at the smallest bit of turbulence, whether it's rational or not.

Moving at 100 mph in a car does not seem exactly natural either.

My lizard brain disagrees with you.

A "lizard brain" (besides being a hypothesis largely dismissed by neuroscientists) seems unlikely to have any reference point or other handling for "I'm sitting in a tube 30,000 feet up at 700mph". Similar to how we're basically incapable of thinking about numbers like a billion dollars effectively.

Interestingly there is a great deal of work that weather services, air traffic control, and pilots do to avoid turbulence for this exact reason.

I can't explain this, but on the day I'm going to fly somewhere, I'm scared about it from the moment I wake up. Maybe 'extreme anxiety' would be a better word, since I'm not actually afraid that I'll die at that exact moment; just anticipating it later on.

I remain in that state during the whole trip to the airport, during check-in, while going through security screenings and sitting in the departure lounge, and while walking through that arm thing that connects to the plane, right up until the moment that I actually sit down in my seat and buckle in.

And then I'm fine.

Happens every single time. And I've no clue why I could be terrified of flying when I'm on the ground, but totally fine when I actually am flying.

I get this too. The second I close the zipper on my suitcase I start to feel anxious until I'm in the skyway. I wonder if missing a flight would cure it

> they should be terrified of driving, but they aren't

Driving you can control for everything pretty much but the 'other guy'.

When flying you are depending on multiple 'other guys or gals' all doing their job correctly, not making mistakes in multiple areas where there is no way for you to verify. So the unknown factor is considerably higher, regardless of statistics.

With driving if the weather is bad you can typically drive later/earlier a different day. With flying that is not the case. You are locked in financially to perhaps taking a bigger chance than you might if you could just work around the weather (in two cities).

> Driving you can control for everything pretty much but the 'other guy'.

Yes, and all the evidence says you're terrible at it.

I don't know about that. Nearly every adult American drives nearly every day of his life, and only about 30,000 die each year. That's still too high, of course, and I look forward to autonomous cars, but it does mean that while many of us know of folks who've been in fatal accidents the vast, vast majority of us won't.

I think people fear the absence of control, and the absence of understanding how flight works; even though there is a lot that can happen to you driving, you or a person you trust is usually the pilot operating a vehicle who's physics you are familiar with.

Yeah, I think it's because people feel in control when they drive, whereas on a plane you're just sitting there. Of course you actually don't have any control over what other drivers do, but the feeling of control is there. Also, a car accident may not kill you, but if your plane crashes, you're dead pretty much.

People know they're statistically safe when they go to a scary movie or a haunted house too. Fear is a primal emotion, not weighed to meaningful statistics.

Airline passengers are trapped in a cramped, shaking metal tube 30,000 feet in the air. I'm surprised fear of flying isn't more common.

Yes. It's completely rational for people to be scared out of their wits in an airplane, or higher than say twice the distance of a tree. No primate is in either situation, it's just not natural. What's different is the ability for many people to distract themselves, they have a more effective coping mechanism. There really isn't much distraction on an airplane for people who either do not read magazines/books, or watch tons of TV and movies. That's pretty much the only distraction an airplane has to offer.

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