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Comment by alexbanks | Hacker News Reader

I am very scared of flying (although I still do it, although it's not fun). Any advice/rationalism you can convey? I am a person that became sweaty and anxious reading your post.

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My advice is to look at the statistics. Commercial flying is much, much safer than any other mode of transport.

Do you get scared when you drive to work? Or take a train? Both are more risky. (Driving significantly so.)

More specifically... The pilots have extensive training, modern airliners have fail safes everywhere, and the amount of research and engineering spent on aviation safety is mind boggling.

See: http://airlines.org/dataset/safety-record-of-u-s-air-carrier...

An accident during flight is pretty much a binary event when it comes down to whether you live or not, but with cars there is a whole slew of different types of accidents and vast majority of them don't cause instant death preceded by 45 seconds of absolute terror. Before you downvote what I said in no way discounts the statistics. It is much safer to fly of course than to drive, but when we think of accidents which is an inevitable fact of any mode of travel one mode is binary you live or die and another not. To our mammalian brains the statistics is a very hard sell.

I agree with what you say, but I think it has more to do with (perceptions of) control than the failure modes.

When you’re in an automobile, you could choose to drive faster or slower, safer or more aggressively. You can tell yourself that you are more alert or a better driver to the people who die in fatal car accidents. You can tell yourself that you have a superior ability to avoid that drunk driver who might suddenly veer into your lane from oncoming traffic. And once your car comes to a stop, if you’re not seriously injured, you can just get up and walk away.

In an airplane there’s none of that. You can make vanishingly few choices to affect the safety of your flight. And you’re stuck in that tin can until it’s on the ground and you’re either alive or dead.

Aircraft accidents aren't binary at all. Many crashes have few or some casualties, e.g. landing gear failure, running off the runway or hitting another aircraft on the ground. Ditto with in-flight failures that don't impact the flight (there's only one major thing that fails, picked up by the redundancies), engine failures that lead to emergency landings, extreme unexpected turbulence or ditchings etc. that might cause injuries and in some cases deaths. It's only the worst crashes (termed "air disasters" or similar) that lead to everybody on board dying. Of course, these get the most attention. I blame the news.

How can you argue against what I said, it takes profound willingness to ignore precise words to accomplish that. I did not say all accidents I said majority are. If you consider a mosquito hitting the windshield of an airplane when it's parked on the ground and no passenger in it an accident that's your problem. Of course I meant an accident that happens during flight as that's the vast majority of the time that people are in an airplane and when they're worrying about dying.

I don't think that's a super fair assessment of my comment. If we're just disagreeing on the definition of an in-flight accident, or what percentage between 30% and 90% of accidents constitute a vast majority, we should probably leave it at that, because that's not really disagreement :)

My point is, there's plenty of accidents caused by things that happened while the plane was in the air, that has many survivors or just some injuries. The news article at [0] has some examples, and it's possible to search for more. Granted, if you exclude the cases where the injuries or casualties were caused during an attempted landing or a forced landing due to malfunction, the picture would probably look much more bleak, but then you would also have ruled out a large portion of the accidents that happened.

It's thankfully _extremely_ rare that it's been impossible to make an honest attempt at a controlled landing or ditching during an accident, and in a large part of the cases where this was possible, things turned out okay for most passengers.

[0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/after-air-accidents-sur...

I was very scared of flying for a long time. I fixed it by booking a flight a week for 12 weeks, starting the first week heavily medicated, and following the advice of a book on agoraphobia (Freedom from Anxious Energy). Then cut down the drugs progressively each week until it was none. Worked a charm

Congrats on it working for you!

Airliners are incredibly durable machines. This article about about how much stress the wings can take is what I think about anytime I see the wings bouncing in turbulence.

https://www.travelandleisure.com/airlines-airports/airplane-...

Then there is this image:

https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/autopia/2010/03/index1.jp...

It is perfectly rational to be scared of flying. Hell, you're sitting in a pressurized cylinder at 30'000 ft flying at 700 mph. But you have to realize that the crew would not do this job if they weren't sure to come home to their families and dogs every night. Most pilots I know aren't thrill seekers but their love of flying are more a drive due to interest in travel and technology.

I advise you to forget statistics. They are very hard to relate to (we're not good visualizing large numbers anyway). Instead, think of the pilots who know these things inside and out and still choose to happily board each and every day. They raise families and eventually retire uneventfully. If they know the risks and still choose to go to work, surely you can board a flight.

That's a bad argument, every dangerous profession also has lots of experienced people that still choose to work there.

I feel for you. I was the same way. I just internalized the stats and remind myself of them every time I fly. As a numbers guy, I simply cannot justify my abject fear compared to being a pedestrian or auto driver.

Another thing I do is to remember the physics when I'm on a bumpy. Thanks to momentum, planes don't just fall out of the sky, and even bad turbulence is not likely to result in deaths.

A bit of an extreme solution, but I hear this workshop run by Air France is good. https://www.airfrance.fr/FR/en/common/guidevoyageur/pratique...

I have been there. If you think this anxiety has been on the rise (think carefully about if some time ago you had such strong emotions reading about accidents, etc), consider going to a doctor and treat your anxiety. Medication solves it, I can assure you. Rationalizing does not go very far.

Tons of good advice on this previous post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17654487

I was not scared of flying until one day while taking off from O’Hare lightning stroke to the tip of the left wing of my plane. I was sitting just on that row aisle side though. For a split second it felt like we stoped mid air. Kind of like when you drive over a bump with your car. After that for quite a while I was scared shitless of flying. But that didnt stop me I probably flew a hundred times since then and now when I do I dont even think about whether I am on a plane or train ( well my be for a bit). Airplanes are incredibly robust machines so my advice is just stop thinking about it and keep flying.

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