Michael Comyn, founder of Fly Fearless, describes his day
LAST WEEK I got a call to go to the airport to help a man who had come home to Ireland to visit his family and couldn’t get on the plane to go back to the Middle East.
This afternoon I’m meeting two businesspeople who have to fly a lot but for whom the entire experience is painful.
The ratio of women to men I see is two to one, mainly because when women have children, it seems, the hormones they produce to ensure they protect their children and themselves are very strong and can lead to a previously unfelt fear of flying.
For most people the real problem isn’t so much fear of flying as fear of being out of control. In the old days air hostesses knew that the best way to diffuse such fears was to let a person up to see the cockpit, but post 9/11 that doesn’t happen any more.
For other people the experience of getting to and through the airport, making sure the bag weight is right and being on time for the flight is all just so stressful it triggers anxieties that they focus on the flight.
I’ve had four clients who have forced planes to turn back because they were so panicked, but most of my clients are people who fly a lot but are just miserable doing it.
After we meet and have a briefing session at the airport we head to a simulator which is used to train pilots. It’s so realistic that trainee pilots can use it to help get their licence.
I work with a commercial pilot, and together we guide the person through the flying experience.
After we’ve done it once they get to “fly” the plane themselves. It means that when they are next going through turbulence, or listening to the bells and noises you hear in flight, they’ll know what is happening, and that relaxes the brain.
The more you resist an anxiety, the harder it will try to make contact with you, so you just have to accept it and realise that once the fear response has been triggered it takes three minutes to run its full course. Knowing that helps.
I love flying and have been flying planes since I was 16. But, even so, I was flying into Dublin on Friday when the woman next to me pulled out rosary beads and it unnerved me. It’s only human: we are pack animals, and if one member of the pack is anxious we all pick up on it.
The last thing you do is give people statistics about being more likely to be hit by a car. That doesn’t help. It’s like riding the ghost train for them: every bang and bump scares them until they know what it is.