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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.

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........

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