I Was Terrified of Flying for a Decade. So I Asked an Aerospace Engineer to Explain Everything.

I Was Terrified of Flying for a Decade. So I Asked an Aerospace Engineer to Explain Everything.

For almost ten years, I was afraid to fly.

Not nervous. Not “a little white-knuckle on takeoff.” Afraid in a way that reorganized my life. After one particularly rough flight, my body decided that airplanes meant danger, and from then on the dread would start days before a trip. By the time I was actually in my seat, I’d be physically ill, bracing against every bump, certain that this was the flight where something went wrong.

The maddening part? I’m a science person. I knew the statistics. I knew flying was, by almost any measure, one of the safest things a human being can do. My logical brain had read the data and signed off completely. And it didn’t matter one bit, because my body hadn’t gotten the memo.

So I did what I tend to do when something doesn’t make sense: I went looking for answers. I took a fear-of-flying course at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix. I interviewed pilots about what they actually think about in the cockpit. And I sat down with an aerospace engineer named AJ and asked her to explain, in plain terms, exactly how and why a plane stays in the air — and whether the things that scared me most were anything to worry about.

That conversation is below, video and full transcript. But first, I want to tell you what I learned about why I was so afraid in the first place, because it turns out the engineering was only half the answer.

Is flying actually safe? Here’s the short version.

Here’s the short version, and it’s worth sitting with: commercial aviation is one of the most rigorously engineered, redundantly safeguarded systems humans have ever built. Planes are designed to fly, not to fall — a commercial jet can glide even with both engines out, turbulence is a comfort issue rather than a structural threat, and every critical system has backups layered on backups. Statistically, the most dangerous part of air travel is the drive to the airport.

If you have a fear of flying, you have very likely heard all of that before. And if you’re like me, hearing it again hasn’t fixed anything. Hold that thought — it’s the most important part of this whole article, and I’ll come back to it.

Why knowing planes are safe doesn’t cure the fear

Let me say something that I wish someone had told me a decade earlier: a fear of flying is not a thinking problem. So you cannot reliably think your way out of it.

A phobia lives in the body, not in the logical mind.

When your nervous system has tagged something as dangerous — flying, in my case — it fires an alarm that doesn’t ask your rational brain for permission. Your heart races, your breath goes shallow, adrenaline floods in, and the analytical, reasonable part of your brain actually goes offline in those moments. That’s why you can know, with total certainty, that you’re safe, and still feel utter terror.

The part of you that knows the statistics and the part of you that’s panicking are not the same part.

And here’s the deeper thing I eventually understood about my own fear. I wasn’t actually afraid of the plane. I was afraid of how afraid I would feel once the doors closed. I was terrified of the panic itself — the racing heart, the trapped feeling, the loss of control at 35,000 feet. Fear of the fear. The plane was just the place it happened.

This is why the engineering conversation, as wonderful and reassuring as it was, couldn’t be the whole solution. It spoke beautifully to my logical brain. But my body needed something else entirely.

So why interview an aerospace engineer at all?

Fair question. If facts don’t cure a phobia, why did I bother?

Because understanding still matters — it’s just not the finish line. Calming the analytical brain is one real piece of the work. When the logical part of you is genuinely satisfied that the thing is safe, it stops adding fuel to the fire. It can’t put the fire out on its own, but it stops feeding it.

Laying that top-down foundation made everything else I did afterward work better.

It also helped to hear it from someone who builds these machines for a living and clearly loves them.

There’s something steadying about watching an engineer talk about an airplane the way other people talk about a thing they trust completely. So I asked AJ the questions I’d actually been afraid to know the answers to.

Here’s our conversation.

My interview with AJ, aerospace engineer

Full transcript

Lightly edited for readability and length. “Dr. Cain” is me; “AJ” is my guest, an aerospace engineer with a B.S. in aerospace engineering from USC who has done flight training toward her private pilot’s license and now works as a mechanical engineer.

Dr. Cain: A month or so ago, I mentioned to you in passing that I had a flight coming up and wasn’t looking forward to it, because flying is not my jam. And you started rattling off all this genius stuff about why flying is so great and so safe, and I thought, I need to record this for my community of people who are also afraid of flying. So thank you for being here. To start, tell us a little about you. What got you into flying?

AJ: I loved math in high school and knew I wanted to do something with it, but I didn’t want to teach it or be a mathematician. Someone said I should fly planes, because flying has a lot to do with math, and I said, “Why would I fly them? Why don’t I build them?” That sarcastic comment basically led to a degree in aerospace engineering. When I got to USC and started taking classes, I completely fell in love with the beauty, math, and logic behind aircraft — watching formulas on paper come to life in a real aircraft. Flying isn’t this big black box of magic that happens in the sky. It’s actually very thought out and very logical, and every little detail can be calculated. I never looked back.

Dr. Cain: That phrase — “magic black box” — is exactly how flying feels to me. As a lay person, it feels like a giant metal object full of heavy humans and their stuff being hurled through the air in total defiance of physics. So tell me: how do these things actually stay up?

AJ: It’s funny, because I hear that a lot — that airplanes defy the laws of physics — and it could not be more incorrect. We don’t have the ability to defy physics. What we’re doing is taking advantage of it. An aircraft is heavy, and that weight is a force pulling it down toward the earth. To fly, you create an opposing force lifting it up. When that lift is greater than the weight, you fly. We do that using air pressure and the shape of the wing. The wing’s shape creates a lower-pressure area above it than below it, so the aircraft is essentially pulled upward. Do that on a massive scale and you can lift thousands of pounds without a problem.

Dr. Cain: So the weight pulls toward the earth — that’s gravity — and the shape of the wing creates lower pressure on top that lifts the plane up.

AJ: Exactly. The best way to picture it: take a small piece of paper and hold it just below your lower lip. It flops down. But if you blow over the top of it — not underneath — the paper rises, because you’ve created a low-pressure area above it. That movement of air creates the suction that pulls it up. On an aircraft you also have air pushing up from underneath, but that’s the core idea.

Dr. Cain: Listeners, try this right now — tear off a little piece of paper, hold it to your lips, and blow across the top. Does this have to do with the speed of the air molecules?

AJ: To some extent. When air meets the wing, it splits — some goes over the top, some underneath — and it reaches the back of the wing at the same time. If the top of the wing is more curved, the air going over it has farther to travel, so it has to move faster. Spreading that same volume of air over a larger area thins it out, which lowers the pressure on top of the wing and ends up pulling it up.

Dr. Cain: People always say takeoff and landing are the most dangerous parts of a flight. Can you walk us through that?

AJ: Takeoff and landing aren’t dangerous processes in themselves. But think about altitude. If an aircraft has a problem at 30,000 feet, that’s 30,000 feet of room to recover. Near the ground you simply have less time. And aircraft recover naturally — they’re designed and built to want to be in the air. So being closer to the ground just means less time for that natural recovery, not that the process itself is unsafe. The actual mechanics of takeoff and landing are very safe and very simple.

Dr. Cain: There are so many sounds on takeoff. Walk us through them, because the noises are a big part of what scares people.

AJ: Before an aircraft ever leaves the ground, it goes through a full system check — every single time, with even more detailed checks on a regular schedule. So when you’re on the tarmac and hear the engines roar, they’re often just verifying everything works. We’re not used to that, because you don’t hold the brake and hit the gas in your car just to test the engine — but planes do. After liftoff, you’ll hear the landing gear retract; that’s a mechanical system you can sometimes feel rumbling below your feet. Before landing you’ll hear the flaps — they’re like wing extenders that increase the wing’s length and curvature to create more lift, so the plane can fly slower and land gently. All of those sounds are intentional and designed to make takeoff and landing smoother.

Dr. Cain: And there’s another part on the wing that scares people on landing.

AJ: Speed brakes. On landing you’ll see panels pop up perpendicular to the wing to block the air — it’s like putting your hand flat out a car window against the wind. They slow the whole aircraft so you’re not relying only on the wheel brakes. You’ll hear a lot of air noise and think it’s a dramatic landing, but that’s just the air hitting the speed brakes, slowing you down.

Dr. Cain: Now turbulence. This is where I get the most scared — proportionally more anxious the higher up I am, even though I know logically that’s the safest part. Talk to us about turbulence.

AJ: First: the chance of turbulence causing damage to the aircraft is almost impossible. It’s frightening for passengers because they don’t understand it, but the only time anyone really gets hurt is if they’re not wearing a seatbelt and aren’t braced — you bump your arm on the drink cart, that kind of thing. Turbulence is a catch-all term for fluctuations in air pressure — pockets of air, a strong gust. It takes a lot to move an aircraft that size, and at 30,000 feet there’s no issue of recovery. Aircraft are dynamically stable. I compare it to dropping a ball into a big bowl: it rolls around at first, then settles back to the center, calm and centered. Aircraft return to their natural flight path on their own. Often the pilot will even tell you turbulence is coming and ask you to buckle up, because with all the tracking the airlines and FAA do, it’s frequently predictable. It’s a known thing, and it’s completely safe.

Dr. Cain: I think a lot of us got primed by Looney Tunes — the Roadrunner runs off the cliff, the Coyote stops, looks at the camera, realizes he’s in midair, and drops straight down. So my fear is that the nose dips, the plane gets “stuck” in a wall of air, and the whole thing just rolls over. Talk to me about how the plane likes to stay upright.

AJ: That goes back to dynamic stability. When you lower a wing, that wing is still creating lift, which wants to bring the plane back to level. The aircraft has a kind of “chill mode” — a cruise, or trim, condition — that it wants to be in. You can disrupt it, make it turn or climb or descend, but it returns to that stable condition on its own. A pilot has to actively tell the aircraft to turn, because naturally it wants to stay flat. It can trend downward if it loses velocity, which is why pilots usually keep the nose slightly up — that creates the most lift — and why, even if you lost an engine, you could calmly coast down. It would never “flip and hit a wall.” Throw that ball into the bowl as hard as you want; given enough time — or in this case, enough altitude — it settles back to stable.

Dr. Cain: What about the wing itself bending? People panic seeing the wing flex — is the engine going to fall off?

AJ: I love this one. There’s a famous photo of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Engineers learned that allowing the wing to flex actually creates a more stable environment, because it evens out the airflow. They did a flexural test where the wings are bent up to something like a 45-degree angle in a hangar — far beyond anything you’d see in normal flight — to validate how much stress the structure can take. Interestingly, they found that even though the heavy flex was safer for the aircraft, passengers couldn’t emotionally handle seeing it, so perception matters too. The bending you see in flight is the wing doing exactly what it’s designed to do.

Dr. Cain: Tell me about the redundancy and the regulation, because that’s where I start to feel safe.

AJ: Aircraft is one of the most regulated industries in the world. For any system whose failure could cause a catastrophic outcome, the probability of that failure has to be on the order of one in a billion. Most people hear that and think, that’s plenty. But regulators then say, “Let’s add a redundant one anyway, just in case.” So most systems have built-in redundancy. There’s a reason a plane has multiple engines: it can fly on one and, in many cases, glide and land with none — pilots train for engine-out landings as standard protocol. Components down to the actuators that recline your seat get tested to the worst crash conditions they’ll never actually see, over and over. Everything is designed to withstand the worst possible conditions, and then to withstand failures of those systems. It’s incredibly redundant and incredibly safe.

Dr. Cain: As we wrap up — you described flying to me as pure bliss. Share with our listeners what it is about flying that makes you so happy.

AJ: I’ve been this way since I was little. Every single time I fly, even now, there’s a moment on takeoff — right as the aircraft lifts off and you go weightless — where I have this emotional, almost epiphany-like experience of all my troubles and fears being left behind on the ground. Whatever was happening down there didn’t make the cut; it’s not coming with you. I close my eyes and I feel weightless, not just physically but in all my worries too, even if just for that moment. That’s pure bliss for me. So next time you fly, notice that one moment of weightlessness right as you lift off, when the noise of the tires falls away and it’s just you, floating.

Dr. Cain: And you told me something I’d never heard before — the scent of clouds.

AJ: During my private pilot training, one of the first times we got up into the clouds in a small aircraft — which has no air conditioning, so the windows are open — the clouds came in through the windows, and I could smell them. It had just rained, too. It’s the difference between a candle that says it smells like rain and actually walking outside into the rain. So much more vibrant and clean. If you love the smell of rain, I highly recommend an aircraft where you can smell the clouds.

Dr. Cain: What a beautiful way to end — the smell of the clouds, that feeling of weightlessness, and letting the experience transform from feeling afraid to feeling fearless. I’m so grateful for your wisdom and your time. I genuinely think the best way to start loosening a fear of flying is to understand what’s actually happening, because then you have a foundation to build a new emotional reality on.

AJ: I’m happy to do it. I don’t just want people to not be afraid of flying — I want them to love it the way I do. And with your help, figuring out which part of it you’re afraid of — the control, the power, the not-knowing — people can start to work through it.

A note from Dr. Cain: AJ mentioned a statistic about the survivability of aviation incidents during our conversation and immediately, conscientiously asked me not to publish the number until she could verify the exact figure — which tells you something about how seriously engineers take getting things right. I’ve left the specific number out here in keeping with her wishes. The broader, well-established point stands: commercial aviation is extraordinarily safe, and modern aircraft are engineered with survivability in mind.

What finally worked

Here’s where I want to be honest with you, because I think the honesty is the helpful part.

The interview with AJ, the course, the pilots, the statistics — all of it settled my analytical brain. And my analytical brain had never really been the problem. The problem was a body that had learned to brace for catastrophe, and no amount of good information was going to talk it down.

What finally moved the needle was working with my body directly: with my nervous system, my breath, the stored alarm itself. I had to teach my body — not my mind — that it was safe. That’s slower and less tidy than reading a fact sheet, but it’s the part that actually lasted.

And it did last. After a lot of that work, I booked another flight. It was wonderful. So I booked another, and another. The fear that had quietly walled off so much of my life — trips I didn’t take, opportunities I turned down, places I never saw — simply lifted. My world opened back up.

I tell you this not to promise it’ll be instant, but because I need you to know it’s possible.

If your fear of flying has been running your choices, you are not broken, and you are not stuck. Your nervous system learned this fear, which means your nervous system can unlearn it.

Ready to go deeper?

A fear of flying is one specific shape of a much bigger story — the story of how your body produces fear, why it sometimes won’t listen to reason, and what it’s been trying to tell you all along.

My book, Panic Proof: The New Holistic Solution to End Your Anxiety Forever (Penguin Random House), is the full roadmap. It walks you through how to read your body’s signals, the nine types of anxiety, and how to work with your nervous system to address the root of panic and fear — not just brace against it. The same approach that got me back on planes is in those pages.

[Get your copy of Panic Proof here →] GET PANIC PROOF

Dr. Nicole Cain, ND, MA, is a licensed naturopathic physician and EMDR-trained psychotherapist specializing in anxiety, panic, and trauma through an integrative, whole-person approach. She is the author of Panic Proof (Penguin Random House) and the founder of the Holistic Wellness Collective.

This article is for educational purposes and is not a substitute for individualized medical care.