Fear Of Flying: What It Is And How Pilots Would Fix It

Fear of flying is an anxiety response to air travel that runs from ordinary pre-flight nerves to a diagnosable phobia, and for most people it is driven less by any real assessment of risk than by two things an aircraft cabin takes away from you: control and information. Pilots are not braver than passengers. They are simply people who know what every sound means, who have watched the failure they are worried about handled calmly in training a hundred times, and who therefore have nothing left to fill in with imagination.

This page is the reference document for that idea. It explains what aerophobia is, what the FAA's own accident numbers actually say, what each noise and sensation in a flight really is, and the specific order in which we would attack the fear if you were sitting in our briefing room at Van Nuys. If you want the practical method rather than the background, go straight to how to overcome fear of flying, step by step. If you want to book something today, the fear of flying course in Los Angeles is our $499 program built around this material, and it includes an hour of flight time with an instructor.

What Fear Of Flying Actually Is

The clinical word is aerophobia, sometimes aviophobia. In practice the label matters much less than the shape of the fear, because two people who both say "I am scared of flying" are often frightened of completely different things and need completely different answers.

Broadly, what people call fear of flying breaks into three separate fears that happen to share a location.

The Fear Of Losing Control

This is the most common by a wide margin, and it is the one pilots recognize instantly, because it is the one we would have if somebody strapped us into row 24 and told us to sit still. You are sealed into a metal tube, moving at eight miles a minute, and every decision that matters is being taken by strangers you cannot see, using information you do not have. Nothing about that is irrational. A person who is entirely comfortable driving at 70 mph on the 405 in heavy traffic, which is objectively a far more dangerous activity, is not being inconsistent. They are responding to the fact that on the freeway their hands are on the wheel.

If this is your fear, information is the treatment and control is the cure. It is also the version of the fear that responds best and fastest to actually flying a small aircraft yourself, because the experience directly contradicts the premise. This is why we built a discovery flight for nervous flyers as a distinct thing from a normal introductory lesson.

The Fear Of The Aircraft Itself

This is the fear that the machine will break, that turbulence will tear the wings off, that the engines will stop, that something structural will fail. It is the fear that is most completely answered by facts, because the engineering answers here are unusually clean and the numbers are published by the FAA and the NTSB. Most of the anxiety in this category survives only because nobody has ever explained what a normal flight sounds like from the inside.

The Fear That Is Really About Something Else

Claustrophobia in a narrow cabin. Panic about being unable to leave. Fear of heights that turns out to be a fear of edges rather than of altitude. Health anxiety that spikes when help is four hours away. A specific bad memory of one rough flight. These present as fear of flying and are not really about aviation at all, which is why aviation facts alone often fail to move them. A pilot can help with the aviation part. If your fear falls here, the aviation part is one piece of a bigger picture and you should say so to a licensed mental health professional as well. We are flight instructors, not clinicians, and we will tell you that plainly rather than sell you an hour in an airplane as a treatment.

What The FAA's Own Numbers Say

Nervous flyers are usually told some version of "flying is the safest form of travel" and are rarely shown a number. Here is the number, from the FAA's published General Aviation Safety Fact Sheet, which tracks fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours for the whole of US general aviation. General aviation means everything that is not a scheduled airline or military operation: flight training, business flying, personal flying, agricultural work, banner towing, and everything else.

Read that carefully, because the framing matters. A rate of 0.68 fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours means that across all of American general aviation, including the categories of flying that carry by far the most risk, there is roughly one fatal accident for every 147,000 hours flown. One hundred and forty-seven thousand hours is about seventeen years of continuous, around-the-clock flying. The FAA's figures put FY2024 at an estimated 195 fatal accidents and 337 fatalities across the entire general aviation fleet for a full year.

Scheduled US airline flying, which is what most people with a fear of flying are actually frightened of, sits in a different category again and has a fatal accident rate far below the general aviation figure per flight hour. The NTSB and the Bureau of Transportation Statistics both publish those tables, and we would rather point you at the primary source than quote a number we have not verified line by line. The honest summary is this: the activity you are frightened of is measured in accidents per millions of flights, and the activity you did to get to the airport is measured in deaths per hundred million vehicle miles with a far worse outcome per hour of exposure.

The second half of the FAA data is the part almost nobody shows nervous flyers, and it is more useful than the rate. Over the ten years from 2014 to 2023 the FAA ranks the leading causes of fatal general aviation accidents in this order:

1. Loss of control in flight
2. Power system component failure
3. Unknown or undetermined
4. Controlled flight into terrain
5. Accidental flight into bad weather

Notice what is not on that list. Turbulence is not on it. Structural failure in flight is not on it. Being struck by lightning is not on it. The fears that keep people awake before a flight are simply not what causes accidents. What causes accidents is a pilot losing control of a serviceable aircraft, usually at low speed and low altitude, or a pilot flying into weather or terrain they should have avoided. Those are decision-making and handling problems, which is precisely what training, weather minimums, dual instruction and recurrent checks exist to attack. We describe how our own operation handles each of them on our safety, maintenance and weather minimums page, and we go through the general aviation numbers in much more depth on are small planes safe.

Every Sound And Sensation, Explained

Here is the single highest-value thing on this page. A very large share of in-flight anxiety is caused by unexplained noises, and every one of them has a boring mechanical explanation. Passengers interpret an unfamiliar sound as evidence that something is wrong because they have no competing explanation. Once you have the competing explanation, the sound stops being information about danger and becomes information about the flight, which is a completely different experience.

We go through this list out loud, with a cockpit in front of you, on both the fear of flying simulator session and the full course, because hearing it in an airplane is not the same as reading it.

Turbulence Is The Wrong Thing To Be Afraid Of

Turbulence is the number one reported trigger, so it deserves its own section and a precise answer rather than reassurance.

Turbulence is air that is not moving smoothly. It is caused by thermals rising off heated ground, by wind flowing over mountains, by the shear between fast and slow air masses near the jet stream, and by the wake of other aircraft. It is weather, in the way that a choppy sea is weather. It varies from barely perceptible to genuinely unpleasant. What it is not, in a transport category aircraft, is a structural threat.

The reason is in the certification rules. Under 14 CFR 25.337, a transport category airplane must be designed for a positive limit maneuvering load factor of at least 2.5g, and for a negative limit load factor of at least minus 1.0g at speeds up to V_C. Then 14 CFR 25.303 requires that "a factor of safety of 1.5 must be applied to the prescribed limit load". The limit load is the load the structure must carry without permanent deformation. The ultimate load, which is where failure is permitted to begin, is 1.5 times that again. Severe turbulence in normal airline operations produces load factors well inside the limit figure, and the aircraft is then tested to half as much again beyond it.

That is the engineering. The operational answer is just as important: turbulence injuries in airline flying happen almost entirely to people who are not wearing a seatbelt, or to unsecured items and unrestrained cabin crew. The aircraft is fine. The risk is being thrown against a fixed object inside it. Which is why the single most effective thing a nervous passenger can do about turbulence is not breathing exercises but keeping the belt loosely fastened whenever seated, which also happens to remove the thing your body is actually reacting to, the sensation of being lifted out of the seat.

Light aircraft are bumpier than airliners for a simple reason of physics: they are lighter and slower, so the same gust produces a larger acceleration. A Los Angeles afternoon in July over heated ground will be rougher in a Piper Warrior than the same air would be in a 737. It is also completely routine, which is why flight training in the Los Angeles basin generally happens in the early morning or the evening when the air is smooth, and why we schedule nervous flyers into those slots by default. The seasonal pattern here is predictable enough to plan around, and we lay it out in full on our weather and cancellation policy.

What Pilots Do That You Never See

Part of the reason pilots are calm is that we know how much redundancy and procedure sits behind a flight. Passengers see a closed door and two people they have never met. Here is what is behind it.

Nothing Is Done From Memory

Every phase of flight has a checklist, and the checklist is read aloud and answered aloud even for procedures a crew has flown ten thousand times. This is not because pilots are forgetful. It is because the aviation industry worked out decades ago that expert memory fails under time pressure in predictable ways and that a read-and-respond checklist catches the failure. Even a student on their third lesson at Van Nuys runs the same discipline. You can see the whole sequence laid out on what to expect on your first flight.

Everything Important Exists Twice

Transport aircraft carry multiple independent hydraulic systems, multiple electrical buses, multiple attitude sources, multiple radios and multiple navigation systems. Engines are certificated so that the aircraft can lose one at the worst possible moment during takeoff and still climb away safely on the remaining engine, and crews demonstrate exactly that in the simulator twice a year. Even our single-engine trainers carry two independent ignition systems on each engine, and we test both on every single start, on every single flight, before we ever line up on the runway.

Aircraft Are Inspected On A Schedule, Not When Something Breaks

An aircraft used for flight instruction for hire must have had an annual or 100-hour inspection within the preceding 100 hours of time in service under 14 CFR 91.409(b), and an annual inspection within the preceding 12 calendar months under 14 CFR 91.409(a). The 100-hour limit may be exceeded by no more than 10 hours, and only while flying to the place where the inspection will be done, with that excess taken off the next interval. In practice this means a training aircraft is stripped, opened and examined by a licensed mechanic several times a year, at intervals a private car owner would find extraordinary.

Two Pilots, And A Culture Built On Being Contradicted

Airline cockpits are crewed by two qualified pilots, and the industry spent a long time learning that having two people is worthless unless the junior one is willing to contradict the senior one. Crew resource management exists because a series of accidents in the 1970s and 1980s were caused not by a lack of skill but by a first officer who saw the problem and did not press it hard enough. The response was to rebuild the culture of the flight deck around briefings, standard callouts, cross-checking and an explicit obligation to speak up. Every modern airline crew flies to that model, and every simulator check assesses it.

The same principle scales down. In a training aircraft there are also two people, and one of them is a flight instructor whose job is to sit beside you with their hands near the controls and to have already thought about what happens next. A student pilot is never alone in the aircraft until an instructor has tested their knowledge, taught the specific maneuvers listed in 14 CFR 61.87, judged them proficient and signed a logbook endorsement that has to be renewed every 90 days. That is a far higher bar than any other form of transport applies before letting someone operate a vehicle by themselves.

The Decision Not To Fly Is Cheap And Frequent

The most important safety system in aviation is the willingness to cancel. Airlines cancel, divert and return to gate over things passengers would consider trivial, and they do it because the cost of an unnecessary cancellation is money while the cost of an unnecessary departure is not. The same logic runs a flight school. We cancel flights for ceilings, visibility and crosswind, and we do not charge for a cancellation we make. That is a policy, and it is worth checking any school has one before you fly with them.

Why Knowledge Beats Distraction

The common advice for nervous flyers is to distract yourself. Take something to help you sleep, watch a film, put headphones on, do not look out of the window. It works for a single flight and it makes the next one harder, for a reason that is worth understanding.

Avoidance is the engine of fear. Every time you get through a flight by not paying attention to it, your brain records that the flight was survived because you avoided it, not because it was safe. The association between "aircraft" and "threat" is left intact and is often strengthened, because the anxiety was never disconfirmed by experience. This is why people who fly frequently but fearfully do not gradually get better. They get more practiced at coping and no less afraid.

The alternative is the approach used in exposure-based work generally: go towards the thing, in graded steps, with your attention on it, staying long enough for the anxiety to fall on its own rather than escaping the moment it peaks. Each step should be hard enough to produce some anxiety and easy enough that you complete it. What a flight school can add that a book cannot is a real cockpit, a real instructor, and a real aircraft to do those steps in.

We want to be careful here. We are flight instructors. We are not psychologists, we do not diagnose, and we do not treat phobia. What we can do is provide graded, controlled, explained exposure to the actual environment, which is the part most people cannot get on their own. For a clinically significant phobia, doing that alongside a licensed professional is better than doing it alone, and we will say so on the phone.

The Ladder We Would Put You On

If you called us tomorrow and said you were frightened of flying, this is the order we would suggest, and you can stop at any rung.

Why The Simulator Is Usually Step One

The Redbird MCX is an FAA-approved advanced aviation training device on a full-motion platform. It pitches, rolls and heaves in response to your control inputs and to the simulated air, so it produces the bodily sensations that are doing most of the frightening, in a room you can walk out of. It is never canceled by weather, has no weight limit, and can be frozen mid-maneuver so you can ask a question with the world stopped around you. For someone whose fear is severe enough that boarding an aircraft is not currently possible, that combination is difficult to beat. We explain exactly what it can and cannot reproduce on the fear of flying simulator session page, and the machine itself is described on our full-motion flight simulator page.

Why Flying A Small Aircraft Helps With Airline Anxiety

This is counter-intuitive to almost everyone who asks. If you are afraid of a 200-seat jet, why would sitting in a two-seat trainer help?

Because the fear is about not understanding and not controlling, and a small aircraft gives you both in a single hour. You see the pre-flight inspection done, item by item, with your own hands on the airframe. You hear the engine run-up checks. You hold the controls and discover that an aircraft in the air is stable, that it wants to fly straight and level, that letting go of the yoke does not cause a dive. You feel a gentle bank and find that 20 degrees of bank, which feels dramatic in an airliner window, is nothing. You watch the instructor talk to a control tower and hear that the whole system is a conversation rather than a mystery. And you learn the single fact that undoes more fear than any other: an airplane with the engine at idle is a glider, not a brick, and the first thing an instructor teaches a student to do if the engine quits is pick a field and fly to it.

What Does Not Work

• Alcohol. It blunts the peak and worsens the next day's anxiety, disrupts sleep, and makes any actual event harder to manage. It also reinforces the avoidance loop described above.
• Reading accident reports. Nervous flyers often self-medicate with information and end up consuming a stream of the rarest events in aviation, which is an excellent way to convince yourself they are common.
• Tracking the flight on your phone the whole way. For some people this is reassuring. For most it converts every normal heading change into a data point requiring interpretation.
• Being told not to worry. Reassurance without explanation is the least effective intervention there is, and it is what nervous flyers are usually offered.
• Sitting at the back for a "safer" seat. There is no reliable seat-safety effect to exploit, and choosing a seat on that basis keeps the threat framing alive. Choose a seat over the wing because it is the smoothest part of the aircraft, if you want a practical reason.

Where You Would Do This In Los Angeles

We operate from 7900 Balboa Blvd at Van Nuys Airport, a Class D tower field under the Los Angeles Class B shelf, with two parallel runways and one of the highest general aviation movement counts in the world. That is relevant to a nervous flyer in two ways. First, a busy towered field means you will hear a professional air traffic control environment doing its job, which is itself reassuring once you can follow it. Second, Southern California weather means the flight you booked is very likely to happen, which matters enormously when working up the courage to do something is part of the task. We are open seven days a week from 9 AM to 9 PM, and early morning slots in smooth air are the ones we steer nervous flyers into.

Our instructors are used to this. Several of them specifically enjoy flying with first-timers and nervous passengers, and if you tell the person on the phone that you are frightened of flying, that information goes on the booking and changes who you fly with and how the hour is run. You can read about the team on our instructors page.

Related Reading

• How to overcome fear of flying — the step-by-step method, including what turbulence, sounds and go-arounds really are.
• Are small planes safe — the NTSB and FAA general aviation numbers, and how training flying differs from personal flying.
• Fear of flying course in Los Angeles — our $499 program including an hour of flight time with an instructor.
• Fear of flying simulator session — the $189 full-motion session that never leaves the ground.
• A discovery flight for nervous flyers — how the hour is paced when you tell us you are anxious.
• Safety at You Fly LA — maintenance intervals, weather minimums and training standards.

Fear Of Flying FAQ

What Is The Difference Between Fear Of Flying And Aerophobia?

They are used interchangeably in everyday speech. Aerophobia is the clinical-sounding term for a specific phobia of flying, which means an intense, persistent fear that is out of proportion to the actual danger and that causes avoidance or significant distress. Ordinary pre-flight nerves sit on the same spectrum but do not stop you boarding. The practical difference is not the label but whether the fear is changing your decisions.

How Common Is Fear Of Flying?

It is one of the most frequently reported specific fears, and a large share of people who fly regularly describe some anxiety about it. We will not quote a percentage, because the published figures vary enormously depending on how the question is asked and what threshold is used. What we can tell you from the phone line is that nervous flyers call us every week and are never treated as unusual.

Can Turbulence Break An Airplane?

Not in normal operations. Under 14 CFR 25.337 a transport category airplane must be designed for a positive limit maneuvering load factor of at least 2.5g, and 14 CFR 25.303 then requires a factor of safety of 1.5 on top of that limit load. Turbulence encountered in airline flying is well inside those figures. Turbulence injuries occur almost entirely to people who are not wearing a seatbelt.

What Actually Causes General Aviation Accidents?

The FAA's General Aviation Safety Fact Sheet ranks the leading causes of fatal general aviation accidents from 2014 to 2023 as loss of control in flight, power system component failure, unknown or undetermined, controlled flight into terrain, and accidental flight into bad weather. Turbulence and structural failure do not appear on that list.

Will Flying A Small Plane Make My Fear Worse?

It can if it is done badly, which is why the pacing matters. A nervous flyer should not be surprised by anything, should be briefed on the whole flight before the engine starts, and should have an explicit agreement that the flight ends whenever they say so. Done that way, the far more common outcome is that the fear drops, because the experience directly contradicts what the fear predicted.

Do I Have To Take The Controls?

No. On any flight with us you can sit in the right seat and simply watch, and on the simulator you can watch the whole session without touching anything. Taking the controls tends to help more than watching does, because the fear is usually about control, but that is a choice you make in the airplane, not one you commit to when you book.

Is A Simulator Session Worth It If My Fear Is About Airline Flights?

Often yes, as a first step. The simulator reproduces the motion cues, the instrument environment, the radio work and the sequence of a flight without leaving the building, and it can be stopped at any moment. For people whose anxiety currently prevents boarding, it is the lowest-threshold way to start.

Should I See A Therapist Instead?

If your fear is severe, causes avoidance that affects your life, or comes with panic attacks, then working with a licensed mental health professional is the right primary step, and we will tell you that rather than take your booking. What we offer is the aviation half: accurate explanation and graded, controlled exposure to a real cockpit. The two work well together.

Start Wherever You Are Comfortable

If you are not sure which step fits you, the conversation costs nothing. Book a free consultation or call (818) 330-1318 any day between 9 AM and 9 PM and tell us honestly how bad it is; we will tell you honestly what we think will help. If you already know you want to be in an aircraft, a 60-minute discovery flight is $229 and you fly it yourself from the left seat. If leaving the ground is too much today, the full-motion simulator experience is $189 and never goes anywhere. We are at 7900 Balboa Blvd, Van Nuys, CA 91406.