Flight phobia: how to treat it?

Are you concerned by flight phobia?

Flight phobia is an expression of fear and anxiety triggered by the prospect of a plane trip, whether in your home country or to the other end of the world. In its most acute form, the anxiety can set in as soon as the trip is planned and the flights booked. It then grows as the day of departure approaches, sometimes to the point of causing insomnia.

Feelings of distress and anxiety peak at the airport, during boarding and during the flight itself. Once in the air, the patient may feel deep discomfort, stress and become hyper-receptive to surrounding signals. Every signal is then interpreted catastrophically, whether it is an unfamiliar noise or in-flight turbulence — perfectly normal events.

Flight phobia expresses itself to varying degrees and can cause symptoms of stress, anxiety, or even panic.

List of flight phobia symptoms

• Trembling
• Sweating
• Heart palpitations
• Gastric difficulties
• Blushing
• Loss of bearings
• Sense of disorientation
• Irritability

Flight phobia and avoidance

Another symptom is avoidance. In its acute form, it means giving up flying altogether, out of fear of facing the anxiety. The person carefully avoids airports, which has the harmful effect of rooting the anxiety even deeper through the misleading comfort of no longer feeling it.

Another, more common, avoidance strategy: many people who suffer from in-flight anxiety turn to medication or alcohol, before or during the flight. This dampens the symptoms by lowering their level of awareness, without actually overcoming the underlying fear.

Sometimes the symptoms are light enough to be borne. The flight can take place at the cost of significant discomfort or stress, without reaching panic or phobia. The traveller often plunges into distractions (films or books) to avoid thinking about a situation that deeply worries them. Even though it is far less disabling, this case should be watched: it can drift into a full-blown fear of flying if left unchecked.

Whatever your degree of fear of flying (phobia, panic, stress or anxiety), read carefully what follows. We share techniques and methods to durably overcome flight phobia. To learn more about your own fear, you can already take our assessment questionnaire.

Where does flight phobia come from?

Fear of flying: a complex phobia

Where does flight phobia come from? In truth, there is no universal answer to that question. It is an anxiety disorder that is particularly hard to diagnose, different in every person.

Flight phobia is a complex phobia, a mix of fears specific to flying (fear of technical failure, of pilot error, turbulence, fear of a crash) and non-specific fears (claustrophobia, social phobias, fear of the ocean, fear of losing control). In some patients, these non-specific fears predate the flight phobia, but they are revealed by the situation of being in the air.

The trouble with flight phobia or in-flight anxiety is that these disorders mix together. They become hard to untangle and identify without outside help (be it cognitive behavioural therapy or hypnosis).

The feeling of unease is self-sustaining and takes the name of fear of flying, anxiety, or even flight phobia when it becomes truly paralysing.

How do you become flight phobic?

Flight phobia is not innate. It is always curable. We cannot say it often enough — no one is born with a phobia of flying. On the contrary, it is an acquired fear, aggregating pre-existing disorders.

The way someone acquires flight phobia cannot be generalised. Sometimes it can stem from a difficult experience on a plane: a bumpy flight, heavy turbulence, an in-flight technical issue. In many other cases, it appears from one day to the next, with no logical cause to identify. Some phobias even appear among cabin crew or frequent flyers, after thousands of hours of uneventful flight.

Finally, in many cases, in-flight anxiety is self-fed by media coverage of air crashes. Although infinitely rarer than road accidents, their coverage amplifies anxiety in people with an anxious disposition. That is why it is recommended to avoid focusing on 24/7 news and to seek balanced information from genuine aviation safety specialists.

Definition of flight phobia

Flight phobia is also called aviophobia or aerodromophobia. It belongs to the family of anxiety disorders. It is the phobia of plane travel.

Phobia should be distinguished from simple fear. The latter is a graded, adapted response, useful in case of danger. By contrast, phobia is a pathological fear that needs treatment. It has no link with reality and considerably overestimates risk.

Phobia is close to anxiety, a state of mental distress caused by the apprehension of a danger. We can talk about flight phobia when the anxiety is strongly disabling, to the point of generating great discomfort or the inability to fly at all.

In-flight anxiety: 3 examples of triggers

Flying is a trigger for specific anxieties, often pre-existing ones. Below are 3 examples (non-exhaustive) of anxiety disorders that surface once in flight, and that can be treated separately.

Fear of flying and claustrophobia

Claustrophobia is the fear of confined spaces. Very widespread, it is one of the main causes of flight phobias. The patients concerned struggle with being in a small cabin they cannot leave.

What expresses itself in claustrophobia is, in particular, the panicked fear of being unable to escape in case of danger. It is linked to the loss of control felt by many air travellers. Once identified, treating claustrophobia as an anxiety disorder is one possible route to overcoming flight phobia.

Air pockets and in-flight turbulence

Air pockets are probably the most widespread misconception about flying. They come from a mistaken idea that there would be zones of "emptiness" in the sky. In air pockets, the plane would no longer be supported, would suffer turbulence and might even fall.

Of course, none of this is true. Air pockets do not exist — there is no more emptiness in air than there is in water. Turbulence is caused by movements of air masses. Harmless to aircraft, it causes at most some discomfort in the cabin. Within cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), patients can receive reliable information about aircraft and aviation safety to short-circuit their preconceived ideas and defuse most of their in-flight fears.

Fear of heights

Fear of heights (or acrophobia) is a disproportionate fear of the void compared with the real danger. It is worth remembering that a plane cannot just fall out of the sky. On the contrary, thanks to lift, it can glide for many kilometres even if the engines were switched off. Fear of heights, too, can be overcome through CBT-based methods.

How to overcome flight phobia?

Excellent news: flight phobia is not a fate set in stone. It can always be treated, whatever the degree, with high success rates when relying on proven CBT-based methods.

It is never too late, nor too early, to treat flight phobia. Everyone can benefit from the contribution of CBT-based methods for fear of flying and rediscover the pleasure of flying with a calm mind.

Overcoming fear of flying is a major achievement. It lets you feel fully in charge of your own choices, and lets you enjoy trips with family or friends, in your home country or anywhere in the world. For business travellers, it means finally taking work trips without phobias or anxiety getting in the way.

To overcome flight phobia, there is more than one route: hypnosis, homeopathy or self-help books all have their advocates. That said, it is clearly on the side of psychology and cognitive behavioural therapy that the best results are seen, helping people recover from phobias and travel with peace of mind.

Cognitive behavioural therapy

Every therapy against flight phobia is different. It needs to identify the nature of the anxiety and any associated disorders that may compose it.

Identifying the cause of a phobia or in-flight anxiety is fundamental. It gives the opportunity to treat any pre-existing disorder behind the flight phobia separately. Whether it is claustrophobia, a social fear, anxiety linked to loss of control or something else, knowing the exact cause behind your flight phobia is the first step to targeting the therapy.

Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) has proven its effectiveness in treating phobias in the broad sense, and in particular flight phobia.

How? These therapies are built on two components: 1. cognitive and 2. behavioural. The cognitive part brings a knowledge base to understand the subject of the phobia: aircraft, flying, piloting, aviation safety. The behavioural side helps build a physical response to stress symptoms. It includes relaxation and breathing techniques. Together, CBT lets you replace the thought circuits and bad reflexes that fed the vicious cycle of flight phobia.

The Fofly E-learning programme against flight phobia

Built on CBT and designed by an airline pilot and a psychologist, the Fofly E-learning programme is a comprehensive way to address flight phobia at its root. Whatever its degree, it follows a structured approach drawn from the latest contributions of cognitive behavioural therapy and delivered remotely, on your own schedule.

Available 24/7 from any device, the programme combines accurate aviation knowledge, behavioural exercises and a progressive exposure phase. You go through it at your own pace, revisiting any module as many times as you need.

Proven since 2011 by Fofly's pilot-and-psychologist team, the method has been refined through years of in-person work with passengers. The e-learning version brings the same content within reach of anyone who prefers — or simply needs — to follow it from home.