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New Aviator DISCOVERING THE JOY OF FLIGHT
Fear Of Flying: Don't Let Butterflies Ground You
In the often hyper-macho world of aviation, it may come as a surprise that one of the biggest challenges every aviator must face is fear. The challenge is not overcoming fear, but learning how to manage fear effectively while keeping it from crippling your love of flying.
After all, flying is one of the few things you do in life where you know going in that doing it poorly could kill you. So you approach flying with caution—and no small amount of fear—and then wonder if it’s normal to be afraid of doing things that everyone around you seems to be comfortable doing.
The truth is, being afraid is normal and most other pilots have felt the same at one point or another in their flying lives. Better still, your fear, turned into healthy respect, can make you a better pilot.
“We have a fear of falling ten feet, and so to be thousands of feet in the air—a little bit of fear seems to me to be pretty reasonable,” says John King, who with his wife and business partner Martha are two of the most highly-rated flight instructors in the world. “The fear goes away when you realize, ‘I know what the risks are and I know how to manage them’.”
Experience is the biggest factor in addressing your fears as a new aviator. As your navigation skills increase, you become less afraid of getting lost. As you learn how to react to in-flight emergencies, you become less obsessed with them because you’ve considered and practiced how to deal with them. After you’ve spent 20 or 30 hours bouncing around in moderate turbulence, a few bumps here and there will fail to raise an eyebrow. You may still not like it, but you’ll realize the airplane isn’t going to fall out of the sky.
As you gain more experience and knowledge about what you are doing, the fear may ease, but instead of going away, it should turn into a healthy respect. After all, if you’re really not afraid of getting lost, you might not be as attentive to your location as you should be. Many experienced pilots have gotten lost or landed at the wrong airport, when there was no reason for them to have gotten lost in the first place.
If you become complacent about in-flight emergencies, you may not practice them; if you’re not concerned about running out of fuel, you may not be as attentive to your fuel management practices as you should be. If you’re not worried about the weather, you more than likely will wind up in a weather situation that you may not be able to deal with.
All of these fears, when properly managed, can be turned into a respect that will make you a safe pilot. Fear can keep you sharp, and it can keep you from making mistakes. John says that once, he and Martha were about to take off in their Citation at an airport where the weather had really reduced visibility to next to nothing. Martha was PIC for that flight, and as they sat on the runway after a position and hold instruction from the tower, John says he had a vision. “I had this visualization of running off the runway and crashing in a ball of flames,” he says. Given the poor visibility, “that was probably a reasonable fear.”
Martha said, ‘I don’t like it; I’m not going to go,’ and I said, ‘OK’, and she said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘I don’t want to go either.’” And that was the end of the flight.
“Fear is protecting you, it’s your safety net, and the people that I really worried about when I was a flight instructor are the people who weren’t afraid," says Michael Orentzel, a gold seal flight instructor who flies a Learjet 60 and has a degree in applied experimental psychology.
Fear is also complicated. “You don’t only have your own capabilities to worry about, but also the capabilities of the airplane. The thing you have to think about is, are the capabilities of everything here up to the requirements of the situation I am flying into,” Michael says. The go/no-go decision is one of the continual challenges all pilots face, no matter how experienced, instrument-rated or not. Often, decisions boil down to simply recognizing whether your fear of what you are planning to do out-weighs your desire to go do it.
“I was always afraid of the weather,” Michael says. When challenged by students to go practice approaches in low IFR, Michael says he would often refuse. “It’s not just the weather, it’s that I’m not comfortable doing this in a 172 where if you have one failure, you’re in a heap of trouble. However in the jet, where you have multiple systems and redundancy ... flying in low IFR is made easier. But it’s still unnerving.”
John notes that managing fear and anxiety is all about managing risk. If you understand that fear is natural, and then set about determining whether your fear is rational or not, you’ll go along way toward understanding risk and how to deal with it.
Many instrument-rated private pilots who do not regularly fly in solid IMC are reluctant to fly in poor weather because they don’t feel they have enough practice to be able to safely manage an IFR flight in hard IMC. That sounds like a sound decision. Except that we often hear cases where some of those same IFR-rated pilots crash because they are trying to fly VFR beneath an ever lowering cloud deck.
Would it be safer to file IFR and slog through solid IMC than to head VFR into mountainous terrain surrounded by low ceilings? If you’re really not comfortable with either option, what about simply waiting out the weather at a local shopping mall? Assessing your fear, and determining if it’s rational and if so, what to do about it, can lead to the right decision. Overcoming fear also is one of the challenges facing flight instructors, and those who are successful work at identifying what a student is afraid of and building confidence by showing the student how to manage the risks of the situation.
Sean Tucker, one of the most famous aerobatic pilots in the U.S., was once afraid of stalls. His fear caused him to take aerobatics training, which not only helped overcome his fear but also spawned a very successful career.
“Part of learning is learning what fears are rational and what fears are irrational,” Michael says. “The whole idea with training is that we should make you aware of the irrational fears and try to stop those, but support the rational fears because those are really keeping you safe.”
For example, if you’re afraid of doing stalls, you should go up with an instructor and practice different types of stalls until you feel more comfortable with them. This doesn’t eliminate your fear, but it will help you better understand the aerodynamics of a stall and how your actions can help or hurt the situation. It also increases confidence because you’ve learned how to manage the risk and respond to the situation.
The same holds true for many other common student fears, be it landing in stiff cross-winds, flying in turbulence, unusual attitudes or flying in IMC. Practice doesn’t make the activity any less risky, it just helps you better interpret your ability
to manage the risk.
“Fear is something that, through training, you are able to reduce to respect,” Michael says. “But the moment you lose that respect, you’re in trouble.” John notes that throughout one’s flying career, you will often face situations in which fear and anxiety can make you think twice about a flight.
“Fatigue promotes anxiety, and an unreasonable amount of anxiety can cause an unreasonable amount of fear,” he says. “Anxiety is a natural part of being in that environment. It’s another thing that a pilot from time to time has to manage. The strategy in my view to managing it is to recognize that it’s normal.”
So don’t feel embarrassed about those butterflies in your stomach next time you head to the airport. Think about the source of that anxiety and work out a plan to address it. Because a little bit of fear can go a long way toward making you a better pilot.
—Sean Fulton
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