Experienced Fliers Are Suddenly Terrified on Planes

Forty-five minutes into a United Airlines flight out of Anchorage, Alaska, Kristin Gowers received the in-flight announcement no passenger wants to hear: According to the pilot, the plane had a mechanical issue, and they would be turning back and making an emergency landing— and the descent was going to feel fast.

“Brace for impact!” yelled the flight attendants, as Gowers and other passengers anxiously looked at one another, placing their hands on their heads as directed. “You're bracing and you're like, ‘I have no idea what's about to happen,’” Gowers recalls.

Gowers’ plane was making a “no flap landing,” a routine emergency procedure, but nothing about the experience felt routine to Gowers, who at the time typically flew around once a month for work. A few hours later, with no explanation of what happened, she was told to get back on the same plane.

It was an experience that would completely change Gowers’ relationship with flying.

Gowers soon developed a fear of flying. She relied on coping mechanisms such as booking seats near the front of the plane or only taking early morning flights to navigate her fear. On her worst days, she’d feel physically sick when she was scheduled to fly or experience panic attacks on board, sometimes even bolting off the plane before takeoff.

“I was terrified,” says Gowers, whose fear got progressively worse. “I was paralyzed, I couldn't move. The flight attendant would come by and ask me if we wanted water and I couldn't let go of the seat to reach for the cup.”

Gowers isn’t alone in experiencing a sudden-onset fear of flying. John Dicey, CEO of Allen Carr’s Easyway (a self-help program best-known for its approach to quitting smoking) found himself white-knuckling flights in his early 30s despite experiencing no prior issues with flying.

Fear of flying, known professionally as aerophobia or aviophobia, refers to the intense feeling of anxiety that people experience before or during a flight. It’s a form of anxiety that can have a limiting impact on their ability to travel.

There isn’t a lot of research around sudden-onset aerophobia. Captain Tom Bunn, a licensed therapist who says he first coined the term aerophobia and has run a fear of flying counseling service called SOAR since 1982, found 27 to be the average age when a fear of flying starts to become a problem.

“The story I hear again and again and again is: ‘I used to fly okay, I don't know what happened. It doesn't make sense,’” Bunn says. “Sometimes a person has a bad flight, but in most cases it's not that they had a bad flight. It’s just that non-flying trauma caught up with them.”

Often it’s a buildup of small traumas in which an individual has an experience of not being in control, Bunn explains. “This goes on until somewhere in your late 20s, there's enough of a sensitivity to not being in control, or being able to escape, that flying becomes a problem.”

Having traveled with friends for years, Linda Ring developed her fear of flying almost overnight. At 27, she started experiencing panic attacks, and by her mid-30s, stopped flying completely.

“It was just out of nowhere,” says Ring, a 51-year-old caregiver based in the UK. After 17 years of avoiding air travel, Ring successfully boarded a flight to Mallorca with her new partner. With this obstacle behind her, she booked a trip to Venice for her 50th birthday—but in the days leading up to the trip, her fears came back.

“I think it’s the little traumas which have built up to that, and the learned behavior from my mum,” says Ring, noting that her mother suffered from nervousness and agoraphobia. “I think it’s something more really about me rather than the actual flying,” she explains.

And then, of course, there’s the COVID effect. “We haven't had a crash in the US on a major airline for over 20 years, so you would think, logically speaking, we would no longer have any business,” says Bunn. “But if you figure that flying problems are caused unconsciously by being exposed to trauma, that explains why we have had a level number of clients since we began in 1982 until COVID, and then [after] COVID it almost doubled.”

A life event—such as the loss of a loved one, getting married, or having kids—can have us reflect on simple things such as flying, says Dicey, who became the guinea pig for Allen Carr’s self-help course on flying.

Kyle Koukol, a professional pilot who founded Dial A Pilot, a service people can use to speak to pilots about upcoming flights or fears they have around flying, agrees that having kids can be a catalyst.

At 39, after the birth of his second son, Bill Gould developed a fear of flying out of the blue. As the head coach for a women’s college basketball team this created a tricky situation for Gould, who kept his fear under wraps while still traveling frequently throughout the US.

“All of a sudden, if I had a flight in for a week later, I would literally wake up in the middle of the night, very anxious and stressed,” Gould says. Facing the ultimatum—his job or his fear—forced him to address the problem.

But having kids doesn’t have to trigger a fear of flying—and in some cases, it can be a solution. Katie Hines, a 46-year-old IT operations manager living in Florida, developed a fear of flying “out of nowhere” at 25. It happened “just somewhere up in the air,” she says. “It wasn’t when we took off, it wasn’t when we were landing… I can remember clear as day looking down at my feet and feeling like I could see through the bottom of the plane, straight to the ground, and just being completely overwhelmed.”

While the fear didn’t prohibit Hines from flying, it did become all-consuming. She couldn’t sleep before an upcoming flight and would white knuckle the entire journey. The arrival of her kids helped Hines dial back her anxieties around flying, since she didn’t want her children to be afraid. Plus, she adds, “It’s hard to let a lot of things about a flight bother you when you're sitting next to an eight-year-old who's basically treating it like an amusement park ride.”

Media reports of worsening turbulence and issues with Boeing planes have led to more people calling Koukol’s Dial-A-Pilot service. Gowers, who experienced the no flap landing in Alaska and still flies about twice a month, relies on this service when flying in and out of Denver International Airport—which is notorious for turbulent flights—or when she’s feeling particularly anxious.

“Learning what happened, learning the protocols, and really hearing from pilots who are like, ‘Oh, yeah, that's not a big deal. This is what it is,’ has really been life changing for me,” Gowers says.

While Koukol hasn’t seen turbulence encounters increase on his own flights, he does note that the jet stream—which is the predominant movement of air around the world—has moved further south into an area where pilots fly airplanes more often. Still, people shouldn’t fear turbulence because the tools to identify and avoid severe turbulence are very sophisticated, he says.

Some fearful flyers could have all the information in the world about the mechanics of a plane and it still wouldn’t help them overcome the fear.

“I've seen a lot of behind the scenes, I've been sitting on jump seats in cockpits… I’ve seen it all,” says Disa Luiro, a 26-year-old student from Finland. It's a very irrational fear, explains Luiro, who flew frequently due to her mother's work as a flight attendant and suddenly developed a fear after news reports of Boeing’s issues. She suspects a feeling of lack of control on flights plays a big role in her fear.

Lynn Capsalors, a 61-year-old living in Florida, only overcame her fear when she accepted she wasn’t really in control of life. “Once I really surrendered to life in general, it became easier,” she says. Capsalors, who developed the fear in her 20s, has taken nine flights this past year. “There’s very little we really can control.”

Stumbling upon a TV documentary, Todd Chroman, a 62-year-old salesman, went from not having stepped on a plane for over 20 years to flying around the world after following the advice of the show’s therapist who advised their client to repeatedly say the worst thing that could happen on a plane out loud. Chroman ran to the bathroom mirror and chanted, “The plane will crash.” A sudden realization of how hysterical he was led to the breakthrough that enabled him to board the flight and fall in love with flying.

A desire to take back control is why Gowers is now pursuing a private pilot’s license as a capstone project to overcome her fear of flying.

“This is my biggest fears all at once,” she says. “But for me, it just feels like taking control of it again and really learning as much as I can.”

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