It’s been a bad year for aviophobes. About 30% of us find air travel anything from faintly disconcerting to unutterably terrifying, as we pore over reports of near-misses and midair collisions and watch episodes of Air Crash Investigation through clenched fingers. A smaller number won’t be tempted on to an aeroplane for all the riches of Richard Branson, certain that, whatever statistics say, humans simply weren’t meant to be rattling through the air in a malodorous tin can, five miles above the safety of solid ground. Aviophobia is pervasive and, it would seem, growing; we’re flying more than ever, but that doesn’t mean we like it.

The two Malaysian Airlines disasters were the most spectacular accidents of this year, with the disappearance of flight 370 somewhere over the Indian Ocean still shrouded in mystery, the shooting down of flight 17 both horrifying and tragic. There are claims and counter-claims about both incidents, with conspiracy theorists asserting that 370 landed safely at an American naval base, or was hit by an errant Chinese missile; others suggest that 17 was downed on orders direct from Moscow, or that its pilots had taken the risky route over Ukraine in an attempt to cut fuel costs.

There were other, less well-documented incidents during the year, from the hijacking of an Ethiopian Airlines flight from Addis Ababa to Milan in February to the Air Algérie MD-83 that came down over the Sahara in July, apparently ripped apart in midair by a violent sandstorm. Ukraine wasn’t the only place where the political world made a sudden incursion into the realm of the personal. Incidents in March and December saw Russian jets, flying with transponders switched off, come within seconds of disaster, forcing the pilots of two SAS 737s to take evasive action. There were also rumours of Islamic State militants securing weaponry that could shoot down aircraft flying at more than 30,000ft, prompting several airlines to reroute their planes around Iraq.

Finally, at the end of the year, there was chaos at Nats, the public-private partnership that runs Britain’s air traffic control systems. The whole of London’s airspace was restricted for more than an hour on 12 December, with disruption continuing for several subsequent days. Aircraft were diverted to other airports, with about 100 flights cancelled. Vince Cable said Nats had been “penny wise and pound foolish” and was running “ancient computer systems, which then crash”. It eventually emerged that a single line of computer code more than 25 years old was responsible for the shutdown.

All of these incidents, reported at length in rolling Technicolor, have haunted those among us for whom flying is far from the Delibes-soundtracked dream presented in airline advertisements. Fear of flying has become the archetypal modern phobia, the focal point of our discomforts about technology, about the pace of contemporary life, about ceding control to forces unseen and barely understood. While flying remains the safest form of transport, our atavistic brains are densely resistant to the force of statistics, and it’s hard to believe that anything other than some dark magic is lifting these 500-tonne metal monsters into the sky.

Flying is a magnet for our vulnerability, for our fear of death, for our existential panic, and every story of metal fatigue, clear-air turbulence and engine failure merely serves to confirm our sense of flight as unnatural, uncomfortable and, eventually, catastrophic.

The terror that grips the aviophobe is paralysing, brutal, breathless. While no two aviophobics are the same, fear tends to coalesce around phobias of distance – vertigo and agoraphobia – and constriction – claustrophobia, and concerns about an inability to escape. Some fear take-off, others fear landing, and a higher proportion are fine until the first giddy lurches of turbulence set in. Others suffer recurrent panic attacks centring on visions of snapping wings, flaming engines, the long plummet earthwards as the plane is torn in half. A whole industry has sprung up to help alleviate the symptoms of aviophobia, with individuals and courses offering a smorgasbord of psychotherapy, hypnosis and other, wackier, cures promising to help those who fly to do so less fearfully, to persuade those who don’t to make their first forays skywards.

One of the world’s leading experts on the fear of flying is Professor Robert Bor, a psychologist, pilot and co-author of the bestselling Overcome Your Fear of Flying. Bor is a psychiatric consultant to the Royal Air Force and is listed on the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum wall of honour. He has written widely on aviophobia, air rage and the training of crew to deal with fearful flyers. We spoke by phone and he told me that 2001 marked a significant turn in the development of aviophobia. “9/11 was the first time in history that people had watched a commercial air accident in real time,” he said. “It had such impact, and they were such iconic images. We can see in our minds the fact that the people on the planes were alive one second and dead the next. I think that is indelibly set in a large number of our minds. And then the two recent Malaysian air crashes both throw up more questions and feed into the uncertainty and worry that people with flying fears have, that things can still happen that can’t be explained.”

Wreckage and personal possessions at the site where Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crashed in Ukraine. Photograph: Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images

Perversely, many of the procedures put in place since the terrorist attacks to make travel safer merely increase the panic of the aviophobe. “You only have to travel through an airport to see the vast array of counter-measures aimed at protecting us from terrorism,” Bor said. “These are there to protect us but they’re also a reminder that there are bad people out there. That extends to the safety demonstration on an aircraft. If you’re a fearful flyer, you might not want to listen to it because it reminds you that maybe air travel does have a soft underbelly, that there’s some vulnerability there.”

I asked Bor the secret of his success in treating aviophobia . “Exposure,” he answered immediately. “In people’s minds they’ve built up a story of what’s going to go wrong, and then they look for cues to validate their story. So if they see a flight attendant looking a bit serious, they will take a cue from that that the plane is in trouble. So their attentions are misguided, their conclusions are incorrect. If you can correct that real-time, it makes an enormous difference. So I travelled with one patient on a plane up to Edinburgh last week, and from her seat she kept looking up at the flight attendants. In her mind, because they were walking quickly, it meant they were gathering together emergency procedures and briefing one another about the disaster that was about to happen. But I was there, and I was able to challenge that, saying, ‘Why have we not been told about it? Have we heard a change in engine noise? Have we changed position in the sky? Is there any evidence at all that something’s wrong?’”

Bor sounds a note of hope. Despite the intensity of the fear many feel when they board a plane, most of us don’t allow it to rule our lives. “The vast majority of people get on with it. Yes, it’s a very common fear but most people develop strategies for dealing with it. And that might be anything from consuming a bit of alcohol, taking medications, getting some form of treatment, putting on headphones, breathing exercises… ”

It’s here that I should admit to my own phobia. TC Boyle expresses precisely the timbre of my fear of flying in his short story “The Human Fly”: “At best, I consider flying an unavoidable necessity, a time to resurrect forgotten prayers and contemplate the end of all joy in a twisted howling heap of machinery; at worst, I rank it right up there with psychotic episodes and torture at the hands of malevolent strangers.” I have veered between uncomfortable and petrified on flights for the past 10 years, despite a long familial history of aviation. My grandfather used to tell me, a note of wonder in his voice, of the time his plane was hit by lightning as he flew a mission over the South China Sea during the war, St Elmo’s fire rolling down the wings. My father was an aerobatic pilot and continues to instruct at an aerodrome in Suffolk as he nears the end of his eighth decade. Perhaps my fear can be traced back to a childhood growing up next to Redhill aerodrome, where my dad would take me up in ancient Tiger Moths, my mother watching in near-panic as he turned impossible arabesques in the Surrey sky above. My earliest memory is of my uncle crashing a plane into the barn at the back of my house.

I decided that 2014 was the year to do something about my aviophobia, which has never stopped me from travelling, but has spoiled many holidays, lent an extra patina of fear to hairy journalistic missions (I confess that my greatest concern when going to northern Nigeria was not the Boko Haram militants looking to decapitate me but the ancient Arik Air 737 that was to get me there). It was thus that I found myself, one December afternoon with darkness already fallen, surrounded by a group of 30 fellow aviophobes, about to board an Embraer 170 at Southampton airport.

We’d spent the day on Virgin’s Flying Without Fear course, listening to a series of seminars led by the course’s founders, Richard Conway and Paul Tizzard, and a number of Virgin staff, from captains to cabin crew. Everything is aimed towards the flight at the end of the day – “the F-word” as Conway puts it. Some among us have never flown before, others suffered some long-ago flying-related trauma and have refused to travel by air ever since. Gusts of nervous laughter ripple around the group. Some appear visibly distressed, others wild-eyed and fatalistic. The seminars focus on providing extensive information about the physics of flight, demystifying common misconceptions about turbulence and midair collisions (the first is uncomfortable but entirely safe, the second more or less impossible with hi-tech navigation systems). We are then taught relaxation techniques by Tizzard, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Adrian Edmondson and is a genial and compelling speaker.

On the flight I sit in front of two women who have never flown before. One has the offer of a trip to Barbados with her children so long as she can board the plane to get there; the other wants to fly to her daughter’s wedding in Spain next summer. Both are a little shaky and teary as the plane climbs through clear air under an enormous moon and banks over the lights of the Isle of Wight. A cabin attendant called Karen speaks calmly to them throughout, explaining what is going on, answering every question. The captain speeds up the plane and slows it down, turns one way and then the other. Some of us stand and walk unsteadily down the aisle, giggling at each other. There’s an extraordinary sense of camaraderie, so much so that I’m almost disappointed when the plane drops down over the Solent and in to land, and I leave my band of formerly fearful, now joyously whooping flyers.

I have attended other, more or less effective, therapies aimed at defusing the wild panic that strikes every time I board an aircraft. Cognitive behavioural therapy didn’t work at all – I felt subjected to the blustering orders of a 5ft sergeant major. I also had a session with James Mallinson, a former magazine publisher turned hypnotherapist, who had me singing Jingle Bells while rubbing furiously under my eyes in a technique called havening. It’s also known as amygdala depotentiation therapy (ADT), and Paul McKenna, one of its champions, claims that havening will “change the face of therapy across the world. What used to take months to cure can now be done in minutes in most cases: PTSD, trauma, pain, depression and many more disorders.”

I was not an immediate convert, although Mallinson points to a host of clients, many of them leading figures from the business world, who have seen their fear evaporate after a single session. I, alas, continue to hear the jabber of panic at the back of my mind when faced with the thought of flights ahead. Some nights, before flying, I imagine that long last drop, and the scream as I fall, and I wake up clutching my pillow as if it’s a lifejacket that I hope will unfurl into a parachute.

The chances of being killed in an airline accident are around 11,000,000 to 1, and yet many people die in accidents. This is the central paradox of aviophobia: that dying in a plane crash is highly improbable while remaining vividly, eminently possible. Dan Gardner’s 2008 book Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear looks at the profound lack of connection between statistical fact and human perception in a number of arenas, from health to childhood safety to terrorism. Our brains, he says, are torn between the conscious, reasoning mind – which he calls the head – and the atavistic, instinctual unconscious – the gut. I spoke to Gardner about fear of flying, which is one of the key battlegrounds in the war of head v gut.

“The prime driver in risk misperception is psychology,” he told me, “but it’s when psychology operates in an information environment polluted with nonsense that people can become truly deluded.” The media, he said, prioritise the sensational and horrifying in their reporting, and it is the way this information is parsed by our instinctive minds, our guts, that leads to wild misperception of risk. “In effect,” Gardner told me, “the media report the rare routinely and the routine rarely. You can easily see why people would worry about Ebola, terrorism and air crashes but not diabetes, lack of exercise and junk food, even though the latter three are vastly more likely to kill them.”

The site of the 9/11 attacks in New York. Photograph: Lucas Jackson/AFP/Getty Images

According to Gardner, the death toll from 9/11 was almost 50% higher than reported, due to some unintended consequences of the terrorist attacks. “After 9/11,” he told me, “people didn’t want to fly, and understandably so. They had watched, live on television, as people in a plane died horribly. On top of that, security had been ramped up, leading to massive delays. Intuition told us ‘stay away!’ So did simple inconvenience. And across North America, we did stay away, causing a major decline in air travel. But people still had to get around, so many of those who avoided air travel got in their cars – so familiar, so safe – and drove. But their intuition was all wrong. Air travel was far safer than driving. The gap is so big, that would have been true even if there had been a wave of deadly hijackings. So the mass shift from air travel to the roads raised millions of people’s risk of injury and death, with predictable results. By one estimate, it killed 1,500 people. On their death certificates, it says they were killed by car crashes. But, really, the ultimate cause of death was misperceived risk.”

Like Gardner, historian Joanna Bourke identifies fear as the defining emotion of our modern age, the primary motivating tool by which the powerful control and subordinate the masses. “A spectre is haunting humanity, the spectre of fear,” she writes in Fear: A Cultural History. “Death stares unblinkingly at us,” she continues. “Danger dallies in everyday environs. Sometimes a scary person or menacing object can be identified… more often, anxiety overwhelms us from some source ‘within.’”

Bourke emailed me on her way to catch a flight to Athens and admitted to her own anxieties: “I am terrified of the plane going up,” she said, though “fine when it is up and fine when going down”. I asked why she thought fear of flying had become such a widespread malady, why people found it so hard to let go of control. “This is where the fear resides,” she told me. “It is a fear of passivity. The great myth of modernity is of self-determination. Miles in the air, there can be no doubt that each of us is at the mercy of technology, a capricious Nature, and another individual (pilots – which is why the thought of “drunk pilots” causes such a panic). There is an interesting gender component to this: so many times I have heard people say how reassured they are when the pilot is female – code for trustworthy, not a risk-taker, etc.”

I brought up our obsession with airline accidents, our compulsive viewing of unsettling news reports and horrifying air crash investigations. I asked whether all this served a purpose – whether it was merely titillating, the contemporary equivalent of the Victorian penny dreadfuls, or whether there was something deeper behind it. “I wonder at times at the need to fantasise our own deaths and the deaths of those we love,” she replied. “We rehearse these deaths, but at a comfortable distance – and always with the remote control ready to switch off.”

Like many aviophobes, I’m certain there’s some secret I’m not being told about the dangers of air travel, some great collusion to hide the extent of my peril, a piece of information that will render my fear more rational. My final interviewee won’t let me use his name, for reasons that will become clear. He is a recently retired captain with more than 22,000 hours of flying time and the member of a flight-safety advisory panel. We talk for several hours, our conversations stringing over a number of phone calls. He has the classical, polished vowels of the airline pilot, a voice denoting cool-blooded control and patrician privilege in equal measure. He talks me through the history of air safety. “From the Wright brothers’ first flight in 1903 to the beginning of the first world war,” he says, “there were in excess of 1,000 deaths of aviators. The death rate for training accidents in the war was miles above any enemy casualties. They went back to square one, saying: ‘We can’t have that.’ And ever since there’s been this virtuous circle. All accidents are carefully investigated and the causes established. Using this information, changes are made to the machines, operating procedures and new aircraft designs. The aeroplanes have got safer, the way we operate them has got safer, the people who fly them know how to interact with each other much better. Currently, flying is 300 times safer than it was in 1960, twice as safe now as in 2000. Thus this historic, careful and expensive activity has enabled civil aviation to create that paradox of being fundamentally dangerous and yet, in practice, extremely safe.”

Since 2001, when global air travel took a steep dive and airlines went bankrupt at a furious pace, questions have begun to be asked about the price that carriers pay for their customers’ safety. Given the losses engendered in a disaster – in compensation, in tarnished image and the consequent need for rebranding and marketing – it has long been thought that the safety of an airline’s passengers was above the mucky world of economics. Recently, though, accountants have begun to look more closely at the fat they could strip from the airlines’ operating budgets. The major variable cost on any flight is fuel, and this is where cuts have been made. “One of the safety groups I’m on is looking at fuel and the carriage of fuel,” the captain tells me. “As a pilot, you’ll say: ‘Right, we’ve got enough fuel to get from A to B, and if B is closed, we’ll divert to C. We’ve also got contingency fuel, and then a level of fuel at the end where you say: We’ll never land with less than that.’ And that was fine in the old days, and diverting from B to C was no problem because C was a quiet little place with no aeroplanes. Nowadays, there’s less fuel carried for reasons of economy, and even minor airfields are horribly busy. So instead of being a nice quiet airfield, C is increasingly the second runway at Heathrow. And if there was a crash at Heathrow, both runways would be closed because fire trucks would be working on the accident. So everyone coming in to Heathrow would need to be diverted somewhere. I’ve had some analysis done on fuel-related incidents, and there’s very clearly a rising trend. Touching wood, nobody has actually lost an aeroplane yet, but we’ve got pretty close on a few occasions. You’ve had quite a number of incidents of a plane landing with barely enough fuel for one more circuit. Ryanair had a bit of excitement in Spain about two years ago when they were all diverted to the same place and three of them started to run out of fuel [despite the fact that on takeoff the amount of fuel on board was adequate, according to the regulations]. But there have been other incidents that haven’t had the same amount of publicity.”

The National Air Traffic Control Centre at Swanwick in Hampshire, which suffered major computer problems in December. Photograph: Nats/PA

Most recently, of course, we’ve had the computing fiasco at Nats, when the planes were stacked in the sky above Heathrow like a swarm of circling bees. The captain tells me that this is part of the gradual but notable fraying of the virtuous safety circle in air travel. “Accountants ask what we are getting for all this money spent on safety,” he tells me. He points out that Nats is part-owned by BA, Virgin and EasyJet (among others) and subject to the same financial scrutiny as the airlines (it’s also 49% owned by a notoriously penny-pinching government). It’s no surprise, he says, to discover that Nats is running “elderly equipment, kept for too long”.

With my phobia now well stoked up, the captain continues to list the factors that, he believes, will see accidents become a more regular feature of commercial air travel in the years to come. We discuss lithium-ion batteries, which catch fire “easily and nastily”, according to the captain, and are prime suspects in the downing of Malaysian Flight 370. “In terms of other things that are nibbling away at safety,” he tells me, “one that hasn’t been much spoken about is the fact that the guys who maintain aeroplanes, the ground staff, don’t have flight-time limitations like the crews. They are able to opt out of the European working time directive, and many of them do because they want to work double shifts. So some of these guys are working 16 hours on the trot, often at night. At the flight safety panel I sit on, this is one of the things that concerns us quite considerably. There was an accident in the States which came down to the fact that the chap who’d been screwing the plane together on the ground was very tired and he made a mistake.”

It’s not, in the end, that the captain has made any earth-shattering revelations, but rather that our faith, as flyers, must be absolute, and it seems as if the era of airlines striving towards absolute safety is coming to an end. If we want to be able to fly to New York cheaply, we may need to accept that our safety has to be affected. In an era of low-cost flights and continued squeezed margins at the carriers, when fuel costs and the marginal benefits of every dollar spent on safety improvements will be scrutinised ever more closely, we may simply have to accept that there will be more incidents, more crashes. Air travel will still be the safest form of transport, just a little less safe than it was.

The problem, in the end, is the vividness of the imagined airborne death. A survey by an American fear of flying course found that among the most common characteristics of aviophobics an active imagination was second only to the need to feel in control. The Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, a long-time aviophobe, wrote that “fear of flying wells up suddenly, when people not lacking in imagination and sensitivity realise that they are 30,000ft in the air, travelling through clouds at 800 miles an hour, and ask, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ And begin to tremble.”

The creative imagination and aviophobia appear to fly wing-to-wing. It’s a small sample group, certainly, but when I posted about my fear of flying on Facebook, I was deluged by fellow authors – Linda Grant, Amanda Craig, Chimene Suleyman, Julia Bell and James Miller among them – confessing their horror at the thought of flight, recounting terrifying tales of turbulence and near-misses. Every member of staff at the University of Kent’s Centre for Creative Writing, where I teach, is, to a greater or lesser extent, aviophobic. Isaac Asimov wrote of rocket ships to the stars but only boarded a plane twice, when ordered to do so as part of his military service. Kingsley Amis never flew; his son Martin describes himself as “a nervous passenger but a confident drinker and Valium-swallower”.

Lars von Trier drives from his home in Denmark to the Cannes film festival every year, and his refusal to fly means that all his films – even those ostensibly set in America – are filmed in Denmark or Sweden. Wes Anderson travels to Europe by boat. David Foster Wallace hated to fly, and claimed his fear was far from irrational, given that “a definite percentage of commercial airliners crash every year”.

I come back, finally, to Joanna Bourke’s idea that air travel gives us space to visualise and rehearse our own deaths, something largely denied to us when we are earthbound. Up there, in the dizzy blue heights, we feel our solitude, our vulnerability, our reliance on unthinking machines more acutely than when lost in the bustle of the ground-level world. We can also give free rein to our imaginations, accelerating that moment (which will come to us all one way or another) when death is close, turning that eventual, distant horror into an immediate, lurid fireball. Until I’m caught up in that statistically improbable but vividly imaginable accident, I’ll continue to fly clutching the armrests as if that alone will keep us in the air, and repeat to myself Douglas Adams’s advice: “Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”

Alex Preston is the author of In Love and War, published by Faber



This article was amended on 6 January 2015. It originally said “the whole of London’s airspace was closed for more than an hour on 12 December”. We should clarify that while airspace capacity was restricted after an air traffic control computer fault forced about 100 flights to be cancelled, it was never closed. It also originally referred to Russian jets flying without transponders “so as not to be traced on radar”. These aircraft would have their transponders switched off to avoid identification, not to make them invisible to radar.



