A terrifying mid-air incident has left plenty of travellers second-guessing their next boarding pass. On a Flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv, the co-pilot stabbed the other pilot, the aircraft dropped 14,000 feet in under 30 seconds, sent out an emergency signal and diverted over Jordan. Passengers and crew wrestled the attacker to the floor, and an off-duty British pilot on board landed the plane safely in Saudi Arabia. Unsurprisingly, social media quickly filled with people saying their fear of flying had shot up.
Clinical aviation psychologist Professor Robert Bor, of the Centre for Aviation Psychology, has a simple message: put it in perspective. Incidents like this are so rare that, in the whole history of modern aviation, you could count them on two hands. And the outcome here actually shows the system working — crew and passengers restrained the attacker, and the plane landed with everyone safe. Bor points out that behind every flight there are layers of checks on pilots, airlines and aircraft that passengers never see, and that overall air safety statistics have not changed in the last 15 to 20 years.
What makes fear of flying unusual among phobias is that it rarely stops people travelling. Someone scared of clowns can simply skip the circus, but most of us need planes for holidays, family visits and work. So the fear tends to show up as what Bor calls "arousal": sweating, stress, racing thoughts, quiet bargaining — not avoidance. Triggers aren't always news stories about crashes, either. They can be turbulence, another stressful life event, or plain unfamiliarity with how a metal tube stays in the sky, since humans never evolved for it. Some people also carry it from childhood, having flown with a parent who was themselves a nervous flyer.
Bor's advice for those who want to dial the anxiety down is to treat it like any other phobia: read up on it, talk to a counsellor, therapist or psychologist, and work on understanding what specifically stresses you, how your body reacts, and how to override that response. And if you're flying with someone who is scared, resist the urge to brush them off. Telling a fearful flyer to "stop it, that could never happen" only makes them feel worse. Better to acknowledge that their reaction is a normal one and help them calm it — deeper breathing, meditation, distraction, or reframing the risk in front of them.
For holidaymakers, the takeaway is reassuring: a headline-grabbing incident doesn't signal a new era of danger in the skies, and statistics on air travel safety remain as strong as ever. If you get pre-flight jitters, that's human — but there are proven ways to manage them, and the odds remain overwhelmingly in your favour.
Report by The Independent Travel.
