Illustration: Kyle Hilton

Days before I’m expected to fly, a familiar anxiety starts to churn in my gut. I get moody. Then moodier still. As my departure creeps closer, I begin trying to figure out if I really have to travel, gaming the odds of canceling: Can the work be done without going to L.A.? How mad will my friends be if I don’t make it? Will my niece cry if I blow off the family trip? The day before my flight, dread sets in, and instead of doing something useful, like packing, I’ll enact my own obsessive-compulsive-style protocol. I check Turbli, a turbulence-forecast website, and if moderate turbulence is predicted, I’ll try to move my flight or, irrationally, incur credit-card debt to upgrade myself to first class so I can panic in peace.

At the airport, I look for omens. I call my mother to say “good-bye” — she has no idea I mean the big good-bye. By the time I get to my seat, my brain has gone full Final Destination. Suddenly, I’m Devon Sawa anticipating all the different means of disaster. I fixate on noises (What’s that grinding?), smells (Is that gas?), and whether the person next to me seems particularly susceptible to succumbing to calamity (I didn’t say it made sense). I want to run down the aisle screaming “Get off the plane!” but instead I enter into a sort of trance state, unable to really speak or move, as I imagine, not death exactly, but some deathlike thing on the other side of a horrible unknown.

When I tell people I’m afraid of flying, everyone — even my own mother — usually responds with disbelief, countering with “But you fly so much,” as if we all don’t have to endure unpleasant situations when life demands it. I don’t get the kind of debilitating panic that keeps me from boarding a plane. It’s just that by the time I’m about to fly, I’m spiraling. That sexy island vacation? A burden. That window seat? What a lovely spot to die in. The terror used to be something I could manage, but in recent years, my go-to calming tactics (wine, a boring podcast, a Nine Inch Nails song played on loop) no longer work. My flight anxiety has gotten steadily worse, and the types of events I once categorized as worth the mental anguish have been winnowed down to three: weddings, funerals, and non-negotiable work commitments.

This past spring, when my nerves got the better of me and I canceled my own birthday trip to San Francisco right before I was supposed to go, I expected the friends I bailed on to respond with their usual annoyance and brush-off advice (“Just take a Klonopin!”). But this time, they were far more empathetic. “Oh yeah, totally,” they said. “It’s a terrifying time to fly.”

It feels as though the collective aviophobia is growing stronger with every entry in the breathtaking series of “Uh, what the hell is going on?” airline-related incidents. In case you’ve blocked it all out: A door-size part of a Boeing plane blew off an Alaska Airlines flight in January 2024, just one example of what whistleblowers say were widespread safety issues that the company ignored and covered up. At the beginning of this year, right as the Trump administration began hobbling the Federal Aviation Administration, a U.S. Army helicopter crashed into an American Airlines passenger jet flying into Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. Then there was the two-week meltdown at Newark Liberty International Airport, when air-traffic controllers lost communication with aircraft multiple times. And more recently, an Air India crash killed at least 270 people, the world’s worst aviation disaster in a decade. All of this at a time when there are reports of air-traffic-control staffing shortages, the secretary of Transportation is a cast member from a lesser season of The Real World, and, seemingly, our best hope for fixing the airline industry is the socially alienating comedian Nathan Fielder. The second season of The Rehearsal might have stressed us out even more about plane crashes, but at least he had some suggestions for how to fix things. If you felt comfortable flying before, do you still?

After every incident, we the flying public are reminded “commercial air travel is still very safe” or “still the safest way to travel” — an assertion paired with that infuriating platitude: “Flying is safer than driving a car.” But it doesn’t do a lot to change my gut feeling that it’s high time for me to develop a “quirky lady who travels only by long-distance train” persona.

Illustration: Kyle Hilton. Illustration: Kyle Hilton.

The commercial-flight industry is well aware that fear of flying is bad for its bottom line, and so over the years, both airlines and private companies have developed courses that offer some combination of pilot-run lessons and cognitive-behavioral-therapy-centered sessions led by psychologists. If you’re a nervous flier, you can attend four-day Fear of Flying Clinics in Seattle or San Francisco, or one-day courses in Houston or Paris, or sign up for various online classes. Around twice a month, British Airways hosts its optimistically named Flying With Confidence course, offered at different tiers, including one that accommodates 150 anxious fliers and a private, discreet option for a single (sometimes celebrity) student.

In May, I signed up for the small and personal Premium version (a maximum of four students), opting to spend six hours in a conference room at the Sofitel hotel, attached to London’s Heathrow Airport, eyeballs deep in its curriculum. At around $1,800, it’s an expensive way to learn coping mechanisms. But in addition to a full-day seminar, it includes all of the course material delivered in a British accent, a selection of “gourmet” lunch options (I chose the beef-bulgogi bowl), and a copy of the book Flying With Confidence: The Proven Programme to Fix Your Flying Fears — written by course instructors Patricia Furness-Smith, a psychologist, and British Airways captain Steve Allright (is that name a guarantee, Steve? Is it all right?) — as well as a round-trip ticket for a graduation flight to test our newly acquired abilities, which would take place that very afternoon. “Try not to think about that flight,” said Jai Dillon, our instructor, as we nervously shifted in our seats, clearly thinking about that flight. We would be going to Edinburgh and back.

The class at Heathrow was meant to start at 8:30 a.m., but only two out of the three of us who had signed up were there by then. There was a flurry of activity as Dillon started making phone calls to try to locate our third, but I was certain I knew where she was: simply too afraid to come to class. I imagined her, like me, clicking the BOOK NOW button on the website with a jolt of hope, so determined to put her fear of flying behind her. Then the morning of, she couldn’t eat her breakfast. Maybe she was pacing in the lobby of the hotel, sweaty and nauseous. Or she didn’t even make it out the door and was still sitting on her couch in a haze of disappointment.

I can’t blame anyone unable to find the courage to come that morning, because while the course had the feel of any other conference — chilly room, a schedule designed to turn us into adult babies with a reliance on our instructor to pour us coffee and point us toward the loo (sorry, I’m in London) — it required of us, as we were told at the top of the class, to be braver and more uniquely committed than the typical person who spends six hours in an upholstered wheely chair.

“There are 100,000 commercial flights per day,” Dillon said cheerfully, diving in. “That means there’s an average of 1.2 million people in the air at any one time. And this is where you come in. Of those 1.2 million people, one in four people have some anxiety around flying, and one in ten have significant difficulties.” He paused dramatically, eyes sparkling, rosy cheeks flushing. “And you two are two of those people out of that huge number who have chosen to make a difference,” he said. He was already so proud of us.

Despite a cherubic face that made him seem much younger, Dillon had been teaching this course for a decade. His primary role was to flood us with so much information — to overwhelm us with so many factoids about how planes work, how pilots become pilots, and how air-traffic control functions — that we wouldn’t have any more brain space to feel afraid. Over the course of a black hole of hours, we learned that planes can have three hydraulic systems, six electrical systems, five air-conditioning systems, and two engines (partly so there are backup systems for most kinds of failure); that a cross-check is a safety protocol flight attendants complete to ensure their co-workers did their jobs; that it’s best to sit over the wing because it’s the least turbulent area; that the bing-bong noise is usually just the staff in the front of the plane calling the back of the aircraft, not an emergency; that it’s not just our imaginations — airplane aisles have gotten narrower over the years; that on long-haul flights, pilots switch off taking mandated naps on memory-foam mattresses.

By midmorning, the mechanics of flight had been demystified. We had contemplated how lessons about air travel are metaphors for our lives. We had learned slightly silly acronyms, laughed politely at weak jokes, and sipped cups of even weaker coffee. We had heard success stories of people who once couldn’t board planes but eventually went on to become pilots and horror stories of people surviving turbulence so bad even the flight attendants were surprised they had been safe the whole time. We had been offered complimentary biscuits (cookies) no fewer than 20 times. Now we were imitating piranhas, jutting out our lower jaws like carnivorous fish to release tension in our faces. Now snobs, with our noses in the air, to relax our throats. Next, we began flapping our arms up and down as our instructor gleefully called out “Kentucky Fried Chicken.” Then “boa constrictor.” (We snaked around.) And “ballerina.” (We pointed our toes and fluttered our legs.) To a passerby, we would have looked absolutely ridiculous, but what was pride anyway? We would do anything, eat any number of biscuits (cookies), cosplay any animal, and memorize any stat, chart, or diagram if it meant we could stop being so damn afraid of getting on an airplane.

“Gosh, I’m going to know so much about airplanes I could go do a pub quiz about airplanes,” one of my classmates quipped. During a conversation about turbulence (how it is caused, how there is new technology rolling out to help pilots avoid it, and how it will not actually kill us), we learned that storm-chasers fly into hurricanes all the time and even then planes don’t fall apart. Then Dillon had us all chant “Turbulence is uncomfortable but not dangerous,” over and over until I sort of believed it. (Even when he added a caveat: “As long as you keep your seat belt on.”)

As Dillon went through slide after slide, I got to know my classmates, Janine and Rachel, who ended up being regular late (she wasn’t too terrified; I was just projecting). Janine’s family owns a vineyard, and she has a fear of flying that developed in her teens. She signed up for the course because she wants to be able to fly with her two children on her own. Rachel, a constant foot-jiggler and wine-shop owner whose fear also got worse in her teens, said the course was a gift from her father, who was “probably sick of her antics on family vacations.”

Rachel and Janine both had a million questions, from why they turn the lights off during takeoff to how planes are weighed, and for every question, Dillon offered an answer while trying his best to keep us on track (though I found our side conversation about the foolproof combo of beta-blockers and melatonin the most useful tidbit I’d heard in hours). I, however, had reached the point of information oversaturation. With every new fact, I found a new reason to be terrified. A video map of a day’s worth of flights taking off and landing made me audibly gasp as I imagined how easy it would be for all of them to collide. A slide informing us that 2023 was the safest year to fly immediately made me wonder why there wasn’t an updated slide for 2025. Dillon couldn’t offer any specific reasons or reassurances, but he firmly reminded us that a pilot wouldn’t fly if it weren’t safe. I asked him if he had watched this season of The Rehearsal. He had not.

Illustration: Kyle Hilton. Illustration: Kyle Hilton.

Keith Koch, a retired pilot and instructor at a similar course, the Fear of Flying Clinic in San Francisco, said it’s important to deal directly with fears rooted in current events. He sees an uptick of people enrolling in his courses after major airline incidents, but after such a spike, the numbers go down again. Koch, like Dillon, gives his attendees all of the information he can, in as plain language as he can, and he always tries to find the silver lining. In the case of Newark’s severed communication, he said, the problem was so dire it brought the issue to the forefront, and “now Congress can no longer turn their head and say, ‘We’ll get to it next year.’” Reassuring.

Furness-Smith, the Heathrow-program course psychologist, showed up to teach the second half of my class in a standard-issue therapist accessory: a multi-colored scarf draped casually around her neck. She was soothing but no-nonsense and described herself as the “most pragmatic psychologist you’ll ever meet,” which I took to mean she’d be brutally effective. Necessary since she had only about two hours to teach us all the tactics we would use to get through our afternoon flight. “You have an absolute gush of 39 different stress hormones — adrenaline, testosterone, etc. You are superstrong and superfast. A fighting machine,” she said, evoking Bella Swan describing Edward Cullen’s vampire superpowers. Except we weren’t supernatural beings; it was just our brains, on panic.

I’m a highly therapized woman, so I understood all of this about fight-or-flight and anticipating a danger that isn’t real, but I was struggling to find the scrap of information that was going to allow me to become blissfully unaware of my amygdala. “Fear is about perception. It’s not what is happening to people; it’s what they perceive is happening,” she said, a series of words I could almost, but not quite, make sense of.

Some of what she was trying to impart finally clicked during a discussion of why people develop aviophobia in the first place. There isn’t just one way to be scared to death of flying, Furness-Smith said. There are, it seems, endless specific ways to be scared.

To identify your specific flavor of fear, I recommend watching the eight-minute crash scene from Denzel Washington’s 2012 movie Flight. What scares you the most? Is it the plane suddenly, randomly malfunctioning? Is it that the pilot is drunk, high, and asleep in the cockpit? Is it the flames? For me, the thing that stuck out the most was a woman barfing into the aisle.

“That’s me!” I yelled excitedly when Furness-Smith listed emetophobia, fear of vomit, as a common contributing factor to aviophobia. I don’t think anybody actually likes vomit, but I have such an overwhelming aversion to it that even the idea of someone else puking is enough for me to leave a loved one on the side of the road. (I will also demand to know if that loved one has gotten it all out because I cannot relax until I know the threat is gone.)

Among the other big fears are agoraphobia and claustrophobia. Rachel realized she was terrified of falling; Janine, of a lack of control. It was a relief to find a cause. As diverse as our issues were, Furness-Smith had a one-size-fits-all secret weapon: the Four R’s. First, we were supposed to remember to react. (She had given us each a rubber band for our wrists, and when the anxiety came on, we were to snap it and tell ourselves, Stop. Be normal.) Then regulate by breathing. Relax by doing the snob or piranha pose. And then rehearse by imagining ourselves somewhere more pleasant than a plane. We’re not birds, we were told, so our human brains are not really equipped for flight; if all else failed and we were on the verge of hyperventilating, we were to tense our “bums” and focus on breathing in and out. With that, we left the sanctuary of the conference room and headed toward the British Airways lounge to wait for our flight.

“Why is today different?” Furness-Smith asked as we sat in the lounge enjoying free glasses of preflight sparkling wine. “Because you’ve already put your gremlin, your fear, on notice that things are going to change.” She loved to call our fear an imp or a gremlin. And You know what? I thought, as I sipped wine, Patricia was right. My little gremlin better watch its back. I was in control.

Fifteen minutes into the 85-minute flight to Edinburgh, all hell had broken loose. The three of us were having different kinds of freak-outs, some obvious, some muted. Rachel, whose panic manifests in very physical ways, was thrashing about. Janine was tearfully explaining how much she hates having to rely on others to travel with her kids. She wanted to break the cycle of anxiety and be a good example for her daughter, she said through a steady stream. Meanwhile, I noticed the woman in front of me had three vomit bags in her back pocket. I was catatonic, tracking her movements, trying to predict the moment she was going to retch. I can’t escape, I thought frantically. What could I do? Ah, yes, the rubber band. I started snapping it against my wrist. I was unable to speak more than a word at a time, a zombie, fixating on a horrible unknown.

Dillon, who was sitting next to Rachel, kept leaning over to catch Furness-Smith’s eye for help, but she was giving me and Janine an acronym-laden monologue. “Remember, fear is just false evidence appearing real. You’ve got to have HOPE: ‘Have only positive expectations,’” she said. The gentleman next to Rachel looked confused.

Twenty minutes in, everything was truly bad. Even though I knew what the bing-bong sound meant. Even though I knew what the flap was doing. How was this the worst flight I’d ever taken when I had a psychologist sitting next to me? I tried to focus on my breathing, but Furness-Smith was also trying to chat me through it, which meant I was not focusing on breathing; I was attempting to answer questions about my feelings, therefore amplifying all of the ways I was feeling. I worried for the people around us. Did they think something was legitimately wrong? Would the whole plane soon be in a panic, demanding to know what was going on? Was the hysteria of the three women in Row 14 spreading? Is that sexist to even ask? Who cares? The woman in front of me was definitely going to spew.

And then, suddenly: that heavenly ding! We had reached cruising altitude. We were given snacks and water. The woman in front of me ate the snacks and did not barf. I came back to life. Janine’s adrenaline started coming down, and her entire jaw was trembling as if she’d just been plunged into freezing-cold water. Rachel’s jerking calmed to a subdued occasional twitch. None of us could fully relax, but we weren’t in crisis. Furness-Smith made us get up and walk, and we clustered weakly by the galley. We tried to make conversation — about perimenopause and weight lifting and the differences between maternity leave in the U.K. and the U.S. Back at our seats, the flight attendant delivered glasses of Champagne. (A reward or a tranquilizer — we’ll never be sure.) When we landed, we ranked our performances on a scale of one to ten (nobody came in above a four) and then we boarded the plane back to London to do it all over again.

I don’t know if we just needed a longer refractory period between panic attacks or if the class had actually worked, but on the flight back we were all calmer. No tears, no twitches, no dissociation. We had more Champagne. We were forced to visit the cockpit. We landed without incident. We got off the plane and took a photo with our certificates of completion. Ten hours after we had first arrived, we were baby birds no more. We were ready to spread our wings, take to the skies, and live our lives as people who could fly.

Weeks after I took the course, I reached out to my classmates to see if they thought it would stick. Rachel was mostly positive. She thought being armed with new tools and a new understanding of how phobias worked would help her the next time she got on a plane. Janine felt as though she’d hardly scratched the surface. “I felt there was far too much to cover in one day,” she wrote. I also wasn’t quite sure I was “cured.” My flight home had been turbulent and I’d barely freaked out, but I was also sitting in a row by myself, so I had nobody near me who might vomit and therefore no way to test my newfound resilience.

But I told my friends who asked about the course that while I was still afraid, I had a new, very useful understanding of fear. I was now wise. I comprehended the mysteries of the brain. You see, I said smugly, our fear of flying probably has nothing to do with flying itself. My preexisting phobia just manifests as a fear of flying, I explained. It was making less sense the more I said it. “Fear is just false evidence appearing real,” I said, parroting Furness-Smith.

I gave this little speech to a friend who was considering rerouting her international flight so she didn’t have to fly out of Newark. She stared at me like I was speaking in mushroom trip and slowly corrected me: “No. I am very afraid of the actual reality at Newark.” And then she asked me a question everyone I told about the course eventually asked: “Did the instructor tell you it’s unsafe to fly?” I was surprised that it seemed as if they all wanted the answer to be “yes.” People were desperate to have their fears validated.

So I shared the one fact I morbidly found the most reassuring out of everything I’d learned that day: If a plane’s engines both malfunctioned, it could glide for 20 to 25 minutes, which gives the pilots time to figure out what to do, if there is anything they can do. (“It’s such a rare occurrence they even made a movie about it,” Dillon had told us before clicking dramatically to a slide featuring Sully Sullenberger.) If the engines cut out, the passengers most likely wouldn’t even realize it — at least until it was too late. How comforting that all the signs of imminent death we think we can detect are just pub-quiz trivia. If the real thing ever came, the truth is I probably wouldn’t recognize it in time to be appropriately afraid.