Forget Therapy; They’re Not Flying Anywhere Now

On her last flight, back in June, Nancy Wright came close to mastering her fear of flying. As her American Airlines jet took off from Austin, Texas, for Orlando, Fla., the 30-year-old trade show planner took a deep breath, closed her eyes and squeezed the armrest, releasing every 15 seconds, just as she had learned in therapy.

When the aircraft encountered turbulence, she imagined the plane as a piece of fruit suspended in Jell-O, wiggling and jiggling but still solid. When bumps and noises threatened to overwhelm her, she closed her eyes and pictured herself on her wedding day. “It felt like real progress,” Wright recalled.

Millions of Americans are afraid to fly, a phobia known as aeroanxiety. In recent years, many of them turned to fear-of-flying clinics for help, often persuaded by the airlines, bosses and family members who all had motives for getting them in the air. For many, the classes were a godsend; most programs boasted success rates of 90% or higher.

But like so many other things, the events of Sept. 11 changed all that. Wright promptly quit therapy. And, to the chagrin of her husband, she also scrapped plans to fly from her home state of Texas to New Jersey on Nov. 1 to visit friends, even though their nonrefundable tickets and hotel rooms had already cost them $1,000.

“My flying fears and terrorism ... it’s too much,” Wright confessed. “There’s not a pill big enough that could make me handle both.”

Since the day hijackers smashed jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, demand for programs specializing in fear of flying has fallen to an all-time low. Even as psychologists have retooled their message to validate the reality of clients’ fears, the clients are not listening. And Monday’s passenger jet crash in New York only reinforced people’s already exacerbated fears.

There has been so little interest in fear-of-flying seminars that Northwest Airlines, the only major carrier to provide them, canceled its $450-per-person program for the rest of this year.

“I was thinking we’d be flooded with business all over the place, even worrying that we’d have to turn people away,” said Fran Lawrence, a manager at the Fear of Flying Clinic, an independent company, which operates at San Francisco International Airport. In the past, such businesses always received a flood of calls and new enrollees after a crash. “But it’s been so quiet,” said Lawrence. “We’re not even getting inquiries anymore.” She said Monday’s crash resulted in only a handful of calls--but they came from reporters, not potential clients.

As surprising as it seems, human behavior experts say the phenomenon makes sense. In the past, flying phobias were based on irrational fears generated by improbable cinematic scenarios of catastrophe and mayhem.

“As I see it, people are basically afraid of terrorists now and of flying only secondarily so,” said Ron Doctor, a Woodland Hills therapist whose Freedom to Fly program is in its 25th year. Doctor says he used to average three or four calls a week, but he has had only one in the past month and a half.

“The truly phobic are too nervous to seek help,” said Tom Bunn, a former commercial airline pilot and current fear-of-flying counselor who runs the Connecticut-based Seminars on Aeroaxiety Relief Inc. “If people were afraid to fly before, they’re certainly not going to want to now.”

Studies have shown that aeroanxiety is a phobia shared by as many as one in three people. But not all of them are fearful because they consider flying to be unsafe. Rather, their anxieties are often rooted in other phobias, of heights, or crowded places, for example.

“If I could sit with the pilot in the cockpit the whole flight, I’d be fine,” said Paul Ballard, 34, of Houston. For him, the fear stemmed from a lack of control. “My fear isn’t so much of the plane crashing, it’s what I’m going to go through until I get there....I relinquish all control once I walk on that plane.”

It got so bad for Ballard that 10 years ago he quit his job as a software consultant because he was required to travel frequently. Now self-employed, he hasn’t taken a business flight since. And after Monday, he doubts he’ll even visit his 9-year-old son, who lives in New York, anytime soon. “There’s no way anybody can tell me flying is completely safe right now,” Ballard said. “It’s not. You’re not safe.”

Experts suspect a new group of fearful fliers is also emerging--those who used to be secure but are now shaken by the possibility of terrorists attacks. Some of these newly fearful think the anxieties will go away on their own. But it’s hard to say when or whether some of them will begin seeking help from therapists. Some, like SOAR’s Bunn, thinks it will take a year before appropriate legislation is passed and enough security changes are made to persuade people that flying is safer. He believes that all luggage should be X-rayed and all baggage on domestic flights cross-checked--as happens on international flights--to make sure that the owners have boarded.

“I’m telling people not to fly right now, not unless they absolutely have to,” Bunn said. “Let’s get some real security in place that we can look at first.”

Bunn’s program may be the largest in the country. His classes, which are also offered over the Internet, have been completed by more than 4,000 people since 1981. Like other clinics, his included recitations of the well-worn air safety statistics: flying is 100 times safer than driving, a person is more likely to die from a fall at home than on a plane, the risk of being killed on a commercial flight is 1 in 3 million.

But since Sept. 11, Bunn doesn’t waste his breath with that anymore. Many therapists now are addressing safety and terrorism issues head on. At the Fly Away clinics near Chicago and Atlanta, for example, director Gene Marshall said groups now spend time talking about “minimizing the exposure” to terrorism, as well as evaluating some of the new safety measures already in place.

Clients want to know whether it’s safer to fly at night versus during the day, especially since the terrorists attacked on a particularly clear morning. They want to know about the training requirements for an air traffic controller, how runways are configured and under what circumstances a plane will be grounded.

Marshall, who holds eight clinics a year in each city, said the discussions have been productive. “Their questions are different since Sept. 11,” he said. “They’re craving more knowledge, because knowledge conquers fear. The fear is bigger now. Much bigger.”

At San Francisco International, managers of the Fear of Flying Clinic ordinarily work with 25 clients at a time, giving special access to the airport, in areas normally off-limits to the general public.

But fewer than 10 were signed up for the latest session the weekend of Nov. 3, where the group was herded through cavernous maintenance hangars, led to the top of the control tower and took turns in the cockpit. For two weekends, they also had face time with aircraft mechanics, pilots and air traffic controllers, who patiently spoke about what they do, how they do it and why they deserve the trust of such a skeptical audience.

None of the class participants was eager to talk. But a retired teacher, who would not give her name because she was embarrassed about her fears, said: “It’s been worth it for me, definitely.” The 55-year-old California woman said she had taken fear-of-flying classes in Denver a decade ago, which helped her keep traveling over the years.

But after Sept. 11, she said, she has been unable to get the image of planes crashing into the World Trade Center out of her mind. She limited her television but still “saw it every time I turned around.” She enrolled in the San Francisco International clinic as a “tuneup,” and also to prepare for a flight she and her husband are taking to Philadelphia for Thanksgiving.

“Those images of those planes in New York, that was the final straw for me,” she said. “I knew I needed to get help or I’d never take another flight again.”

Jessica Tanner, a bank teller from Chicago who spoke to a reporter shortly before her Nov. 10 wedding, was dreading her honeymoon flight. “We’re supposed to fly to Cancun,” she said. “Is it safe to fly there? I’m not even looking forward to my wedding day, because I know the very next morning I have to get on a plane.”

One week and several SOAR cyber-sessions later, Tanner felt a little better about her trip. She posted messages on SOAR’s Web site and received tips from other fearful fliers on how to reduce her stress level during the four-hour flight. She planned to breathe deeply, sit in a window seat with the shade pulled down and listen to classical music on her headphones to minimize airplane noise.

“That, and I’ll probably just dig my fingernails into my husband’s thigh,” she said. Before, her worries centered around her fear of heights, and crashing, but never were enough to keep her grounded. Now, though, Tanner said she’s afraid of heights, crashing and of being hijacked.

Still, Tanner doesn’t plan to buy the full SOAR program or seek aeroanxiety therapy when she returns from Cancun. As she put it, “I don’t plan to fly again anytime soon.”... it’s too much. There’s not a pill big enough that could make me handle both.’