Airline course attempts to conquer the fear of flying
Class tries to calm passengers afraid of taking flights
No sooner had British Airways Flight 9240 roared into the air over Heathrow Airport than the cabin air was pierced by a sharp, scary noise, like an alarm or a siren. The power surged, seemed to falter and the plane became worryingly quiet. (Too quiet?)
What was it? Images of catastrophic scenarios — birds, engine failure, parts falling off, total systemic breakdown — pinballed through the passengers' imaginations as the plane seemed to struggle to find its equilibrium. Unease gripped the cabin. But then a disembodied voice wafted soothingly over the public-address
system: “Everything's normal,” the voice said. “The plane is fine.”
This emotional roller coaster of a flight, a 35-minute loop in the air that started and finished at Heathrow, was the culmination of the airline's “Flying With Confidence” course, aimed at people
who are afraid to fly — the lightly nervous as well as the abjectly terrified.
The course includes a deep dive into the mechanics and operation of an aircraft. There's also a section on how pilots are trained to deal with various scenarios — including cabin depressurization, malfunctioning landing gear, holes in the fuselage and sudden gusts of wind on the runway that force what is called a “go-around” — when a pilot suddenly aborts the landing and sends the plane barreling into the sky. The day ends when the attendees — or at least those who didn't leave early — board a plane for a real-life flight.
As many as 40% of all airline passengers have at least mild apprehension about flying, experts say, and people with serious aviophobia fall roughly into two groups. About 20% have “an underlying anxiety that manifests as fear of flying,” said Douglas Boyd, an aviation researcher who runs a fear-of-flying course in Houston. Another 70% to 75%, he said, “think that something bad will happen to the plane — there will be a fire, the engine will fall off, the pilot is drunk, it's going to crash.” (The rest have
a hybrid of worries.)
Flying is objectively lowrisk, and 2023 was the safest year for jet travel ever, according to the International Air Transport Association. But fear of flying hardly seems irrational, what with reports of aircraft malfunctions, overworked air traffic controllers and the sense that climate change is making turbulence worse.
Nobody wants to go through a flight racked with fear or beset by emotional upheaval and airlines have an obvious interest in calm, unterrified passengers. A number of airlines, including Air France, Lufthansa and Virgin, offer fear-of-flying programs, but BA's has been operating for more than 35 years and is considered the most well-established.
I — an occasionally nervous-in-turbulence but not prohibitively terrified flyer — joined an October session, paying about $508.
My fellow attendees represented a spectrum of ages and professions and suffered from a range of anxieties.
Duncan Phillips, a high school science teacher, said that he had not set foot on a plane since his honeymoon, two decades earlier. Imogen Corrigan, a medieval history lecturer, said that she had a “generalized dread of the whole airport experience,” exacerbated by a traumatic flight some years earlier in which her seatmate, incorrectly interpreting the plane's post-takeoff noises as systemic engine failure, rose to her feet and yelled, “We're not going up!”
Standing onstage in a conference room at a hotel at Heathrow and using props like slides, a plastic plane and a replica of a human ear to explain how airplanes work, Capt. Steve Allright, the British Airways pilot who led the program, provided his go-to anti-anxiety tip.
“I want you to breathe out for 4 seconds and then breathe in, while squeezing your largest muscles — your buttocks,” he said. “What you're doing is taking control of your mind and your racing thoughts. Don't sit and suffer. Breathe and squeeze.”
He invited the group to identify its specific worries.
“How many of you have not flown for more than 20 years, or never flown?” he asked. “How many are regular business travelers and it's getting worse? Mums and dads who had children and it suddenly made them aware of their own mortality?”
He peered into the crowd. “Who doesn't like the takeoff?” he said. “Who doesn't like the landing and — everyone's favorite — who doesn't like the turbulence?”
One person raised her hand for all the categories.
Among the points made by Allright and his team:
• The wings of planes can't just snap off.
• The plane has sufficient stores of fuel and will not suddenly run out of gas. “Those Hollywood scenes where they're circling around yelling that they're going to run out of fuel and the plane is going to `land on fumes,'” Allright said, “that's not going to happen.”
• The thing that sounds like the engines have suddenly ceased functioning after takeoff? It's an auditory illusion created by the reduction in power after the plane becomes airborne; the plane needs more power to take off and less power when it gets into the air.
Those movies in which pilots are “wrestling with the controls and sweating profusely during turbulence” are totally fake, Allright said. “Turbulence is uncomfortable but not dangerous.”
When you hear a strange beeping noise in the cabin, it is not a secret pilots' signal meaning that “we have an emergency, but don't tell the passengers.” In fact, “all airplanes make different noises,” Allright said, and what you're hearing could well be something like the “barking dog noise” that people say they hear on some Airbus jets, attributable to the planes' hydraulics.
No pilot would ever unlock the cockpit door and let in a bunch of hijackers, even if the hijackers were threatening to kill the flight attendant with whom the pilot was having an affair, as in the TV series “Hijack,” starring Idris Elba.
The presentation seemed to allay some of the passengers' fears. Charlotte Wheeler, an agricultural company executive still spooked by a childhood in which her acutely phobic mother would drink to excess and become obstreperous and hysterical on flights, said she appreciated Allright's willingness to journey through the weeds of her apprehension.
The hard-news presentation was followed by a segment on fear, anxiety reduction and relaxation led by a psychologist, Dr. Jan Smith. But, eventually, it was time to get on the plane, minus several unnerved people who left during the lunch break and never came back.
The plane flew around for a bit and during its descent, some passengers, took proof-of-flight photos.