Ask HN: How to overcome fear of flying?

Since you are posting on HN and I'm guessing you are technically minded, you might find this really interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ai2HmvAXcU0 - it's a video from a documentary about the development of the Boeing 777. Specifically, the video shows a test where they bend/stress the 777 wings to the point where they actually snap.

Spoiler alert: they snap at orders of magnitude more flex than you've ever seen.

Even for very severe turbulence (like you experienced), it's very comforting for me to know (via that video evidence) that even if I haven't seen turbulence this bad, the people that made the airplane definitely thought about it.

Ask your doctor for valium (or similar) before your next flight. Something like valium will help remove the anxiety of the flight and perhaps even allow you to sleep for part of it. If you can teach your primal brain that everything is ok again you'll likely lose the fear as quickly as you gained it.

You just needs some experiences without the anxiety to help your subconscious learn that fear is not a useful reaction to flying.

Simply breaking the fear cycle sounds like the key for you since you learned the fear recently rather than had it from some buried childhood experience.

Another good thing to try if you don't want meds is to accept the anxiety rather than overcome it. While panic comes on observe what it feels like, let it wash over you, acquiesce to it. This has worked for me in the past with panic attacks, it is quite effective if you can get yourself into enough presence to try it. You'll find that underneath the panic or anxiety is nothing, do some belly deep breathing to help, and maybe learn a bit of light meditation to take yourself deeper. But seriously, beating anxiety in general is more about allowing it than rejecting it.

United used to have a feature called "From the Flight Deck" where you could listen to live radio communications between your pilots and air traffic control.

Unfortunately, it's now only available on a few routes and planes:

https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/united-airlines-mileageplus/...

I found it very comforting to listen to it during an entire flight, because you could find out what the pilots of your flight were actually saying about turbulence and flight conditions, including their ongoing efforts to avoid turbulence purely for passenger comfort. You could also hear from other pilots who had recently flown through the same region, discussing how turbulent it was and how long it was likely to last. Among other things, this can reveal that the pilots are aware of the situation and don't consider it threatening.

Part of the scary thing about turbulence can be wondering "do the pilots realize it's so bumpy?" or "are they concerned about this?" or "what are they doing about it?". Most U.S. flights don't really make a lot of passenger announcements about these questions, but if you listen to the ATC communications, you can get real answers (usually "yes", "not at all", and "trying to get a clearance for a different altitude").

In many regions there's volunteer ground-based coverage for live ATC streams:

https://www.liveatc.net/

It's obviously more complicated to identify the particular ATC region that your flight is in (and then manually change to a different stream every time you're handed off to a different controller!), but if you buy in-flight Internet access, you might be able to listen to some of these communications from the air even if you're not on a United flight with channel 9.

The biggest challenge is that ARTCCs (the high-altitude ATC facilities) have subdivided their airspace into sectors with different frequencies.

For instance if you look at

https://www.liveatc.net/feedindex.php?type=us-artcc

you can see the Denver ARTCC (ZDV) is subdivided into more than a dozen different sectors (and there's no guarantee that this list is even complete). So if you wanted to listen to these communications this way, you'd have to take a rather active role in selecting streams and accept that your flight would probably pass through regions with no streaming coverage.

(Edit: for example you might hear "(your flight number), contact Denver center one two eight point three two five, good day" in which case you would want to switch over to the "Denver Center (Sector 14 High): 128.325" stream. If you succeed in switching in time, you should then hear your flight call "Denver, (your flight number) with you at (altitude)". But if you missed this instruction, you might have to spend an inordinately long time listening to random streams in the hope of hearing your flight's callsign, or do significant research on FlightAware to figure out what sector you might be in. Quite a chore compared to United's service...)

Consider that maybe one reason you're so afraid is because turbulence is asynchronous and that maybe makes it less tolerable than if you knew exactly when it would come. So when you feel that startled shock when the plane randomly drops a few feet, remind yourself that this is "how it's supposed to be" and it's not actually an unexpected sudden failure of the aircraft.

I recommend getting a window seat so you can distract yourself and watch the beautiful scenery. Plus it can feel more "synchronous" when you see your plane enter a thick cloud, then feel a few bumps. And as another poster said, don't drink caffeine.

Your bad experience was probably a 1e-5 event, so it probably won't happen to you again.