By Rod Machado
When Bob stepped into his Cessna 172 on a recent Sunday morning, he had no idea how difficult it would be to apply power for takeoff. No, his airplane was fine. His anxiety level wasn’t. He sat poised for departure but couldn’t
prevail against the dread he felt at the thought of flying alone. This was the fifth time he’d attempted to fly solo, and it looked like it would be the last. A week later, I received Bob’s call asking for help.
Bob (not his real name) had 63 hours of flight time and needed one more solo flight to meet the requirements for the private pilot rating. Earlier in his training, he soloed without hesitation. While he could comfortably fly with his instructor on board, now he was unable to fly alone. Worse yet, his newly formed anxiety had no lineage. No single “scary” event defined or even hinted at being the cause of his newly-formed disposition. He had not been spanked by a spin or tumbled by turbulence.
Unfortunately, these orphan anxieties are often the most intractable of problems to solve. When fear and worry have a distinct origin, we know where to search for an antidote. Frequently, a small amount of additional training that educates or desensitizes students to the disturbing phenomena eliminates the problem.
For pilots in Bob's situation, additional training seldom works since these pilots have nary a clue about why they’re anxious and immobilized in the first place. Theirs is existential anxiety—a generalized fear of something that sublimates into every thought they have about flying an airplane.
After many years of helping aviators deal with similar afflictions, it became apparent that many pilots are experiencing anxiety “about” their anxiety. Let me state that again. The type of problem Bob has is a fear that he will experience fear and, as a result, lose control of himself as a result. No, this malady certainly doesn’t rise to the level of a serious mental disorder. Instead, it’s a not-uncommon reaction by mentally healthy pilots who are uncertain about how they’ll react if they experience anxiety when flying alone. These individuals fear losing control of themselves in an airplane during a cascade of fight, flight or freeze emotions.
Years ago, a famous (non-pilot) radio personality confessed that being on board a commercial airliner during a crash would certainly frighten him. However, he also admitted to being more worried about losing control of his emotions (think “panic”) as the airplane goes down. Our radio friend fears the "experience of experiencing anxiety" more than the fear of crashing itself. Yes, this is a level of abstraction, but it does help explain Bob’s condition.
Thinking abstractly about an event (rather than the event itself) is not at all foreign to the way our mind works. Novelist Gore Vidal described a similar type of abstraction when he wrote about how we remember physical pain. Vidal suggested that when we attempt to recollect a personal event involving physical pain, we don’t remember the actual pain. Instead, we remember “remembering” the pain (an abstraction). Regarding anxiety and abstraction, when some people experience anxiety, they might not be responding to an actual anxiety-causing event—an event whose cause might be unknown to them. Instead, they are responding to their anticipation at feeling anxiety.
At this point, if you feel as if you are enrolled in a graduate French philosophy class, don’t worry. You’re not. That’s why no one will ask you to prove that the chair in which you’re sitting doesn’t exist. If someone does, then immediately say, “What chair?” and fall to the floor. If you make a good "thump," I can almost guarantee you’ll receive an “A” in the class (if retroactive enrollment is allowed, of course). The point here is that attempting to solve a pilot’s anxiety only by looking for its common cause (i.e., engine failure, stall and spins, turbulence, etc.) might not solve the problem. If it doesn’t, then it’s possible that the pilot is responding to anxiety about feeling anxiety. How might we help this pilot overcome this disposition? Perhaps a well-known general from American history can help us here.
During the early days of the Civil War, General U.S. Grant (then a colonel), confessed to feeling battlefield anxiety as he led his regiment against Col. Harris in Missouri. In his memoirs, Grant wrote about seeing a lot in battle during the Mexican War but never while in command. This experience, however, was new to him. As he pursued Harris, he admitted feeling as if his heart were stuck in his throat. Then something unique happened. Grant approached the campsite where Col. Harris had been camped a few days before. At that point, Grant said:
"It occurred to me that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view of the question I had never taken before, but it was one I never forgot."
After that event, Grant said he never again experienced trepidation when confronting the enemy. Clearly, the good General wasn’t afraid of fighting—he had experience in that area. It was his view of the question (i.e., the way he experienced his anxiety) that lodged his heart in his throat. In other words, it was his anxiety about feeling anxiety that roused him.
My approach was to help Bob find a different view of the question regarding the source of his discomfort at flying solo. That’s right. When it became clear that there was no “single event” that scared or frightened him, the only other choice was to deal with how he thought about his anxiety.
If you can dig deep enough (or are simply patient enough to listen), you’ll often find that pilots with Bob’s disposition frequently fear losing control of themselves (panicking) in an airplane. After listening to Bob for a while, it became clear that he desperately wanted to fly solo but dreaded the idea of being airborne and being unable to resist the urge to panic.
As you’ve heard many times, identifying the problem is the first step toward finding a solution. Bob didn’t need remedial training to overcome his anxiety (a misidentification of the problem in this instance). He only needed a new way of viewing the question: Why do I feel anxious about flying solo?
So I asked Bob to describe the last time he lost control of himself and panicked in a new and novel situation (i.e., a different “view of the question”). If he said that, during the previous week, he stumbled into a cave full of bats, panicked, and now fights crime in blue spandex tights, I would have referred him to Marvel Comics for deprogramming. He didn’t say that. Instead, he responded by saying that he had no history of panicking or losing control in new and novel situations. This response helped him make a more accurate assessment of his personal self-control.
Ultimately, it was Bob’s anxiety at the thought of "experiencing anxiety" that immobilized him. He feared losing control of himself should be become anxious in the cockpit; but, he never bothered to ask himself how likely such a thing was to happen. Once he did, he felt more at ease in the cockpit. Much like General Grant’s revelation, a single thought—a different view of the question—completely changes the way Bob experienced his environment.
Perhaps President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s said it best in first inaugural address when he said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
5 comments
I can’t thank you enough Rod for tackling this topic. Reading the article and other comments are so familiar to me. I’m ~60 hours in to training and laughingly .5 XC solo time away from my checkride (I should have slowed down). For a 60 hour student, I have confidence in my stick and rudder skills, procedures, fully capable and comfortable on radios (all training at a towered Charlie airport). Overall I fly well for my station in my journey. I am 48, career technologist that has done plenty of complicated things and tackled some very complex and big problems and have also plenty of very big failures that have taught me well. I think it was Colin Powell that said “never let a crisis go to waste” and I take each failure as a learning opportunity. 10 hours in to training I had a very scary cross-control stall on final after making several rookie mistakes in a chain that could have easily ended badly. In a 180 warrior, I put flaps in during the final turn, airspeed was already slow, overshot the runway by a bit and overcorrected with elevator and the right wing acted like it just fell off the plane. Full throttle and my cfi who was leaned up against the door, playing on his cell phone (to not disparage too much, he was letting me get laps in the pattern and it was very monotonous, still should have been paying more attention to what I was doing). We recovered and landed and all was good thankfully. I have also struggled with getting comfortable with the wind. My anxiety shot up from that point considerably. I deliberately scheduled a weeks worth of flying almost ever day in double-digit winds with a different cfi that was retired airline guy with 26,000 hours and had owned a couple of flight schools. A real veteran. He helped me overcome most of my fear in the wind. Fast forward, first pattern solo was fine, no anxiety and will be written in my mind as one of the greatest moments of my life. Fast forward, first cross country solo was riddled with a panic-stricken anxiety that was miserable. I was scud running at 3000 (2000 AGL) because of some major build up in clouds made me fearful to climb, and I was basically surfing heavy thermals in the hot summer terrain in the east Tennessee valley. Almost hit a buzzard, landing and takeoff at my XC destination was spooky as it has quite an uphill grade and I chose poorly to get the throttle in before getting the slow electric flaps retracted. I was mentally exhausted when I got back, but I made it and learned several lessons. Fast forward, recent XC long solo was 190nm (trying to avoid a third XC to get the time in) and it was less eventful (other than adsb-out failure in the plane, no biggie) and after a couple of ugly landings at my destinations, I buttered my last one on to the runway when I landed back home. I was again, mentally exhausted. One commenter here mentioned “what if I black out”? I think I passed out one time when I was kid because I hadn’t eaten much and stood up too fast, but I have never had an event like that in my life. I’m healthy, capable, confident in my ability to manage the aircraft, procedures, landings are safe while still ugly at times. I most definitely relate to the fear of being anxious, fear of panicking, fear of blacking out or something as the sole soul in the plane. All of which largely irrational to a degree, but still afflicted with this nonetheless. I love flying and I am a lifelong learner. I love learning as much as anything else. It is the perfect marriage to keep my appetite for flying and learning satiated. While I have a bit of well-understood discomfort with the wind and bumps, I can manage and understand that problem. The anxiety induced by the fear of fearing myself is crushing. I almost turned around a couple of times on my last XC solo but pushed through. I was judging things rationally saying to myself, I am safe, the plane is safe, things are going well, I understand what I’m doing. I sipped cold water until my bladder was very happy when we landed, and I did listen to music for a bit and sang along trying to distract myself. Both helped a little. It’s so hard to rationalize because my navlog was a thing of beauty, I have a 430 tuned in, tinkered with a couple of VOR radial intercept checkpoints, had foreflight and my sentry providing traffic, was on flight following and my situational awareness was awesome. I am confident and comfortable on the radios, getting vectored in a couple of class charlie airports were in my comfort zone (I actually am much less comfortable at pilot-controlled fields), and I fly the plane just fine and have good command of procedures. It is still so very discouraging, and now I’m facing that last .5 which means I have to do a third XC solo to bank that time. This is great food for thought and any additional resources or help would be very much appreciated. Also now encouraged to open “Stick and Rudder” that I bought a while back but haven’t had time to read yet. Thank you again for all of your great content and material. Your work has been a major contribution to my success.
I did my training in 2010 and never would have thought that I’d have an issue with flying solo. I wanted to fly for as long as I can remember and actually advanced through my training rather quickly. My first solo was after 11 hours of flight training and I got a little glimpse of anxiety as I initially lifted off the ground but as I started down wind and saw the runway, it went away, and I was able to do my three takeoffs and landings with no other issues. My next solo was out to the practice area and as I got about 5-10 miles from the airport, it started setting in again, and that fear of losing control came over me and I turned around. Over the next couple months I forced myself to try to over come the anxiety, by taking cold water with me and taking a sip each time I’d get anxious. After my final required solo flight I was so relieved that I never had to fly solo again. And I went on to receive my private license.
Fast forward to 2020. I’ve only flown a few times in the previous 10 years and I have now decided to get an instrument rating. I by a share of a Piper Warrior and get currant. I’m fine in the traffic pattern and after about a mont and a hundred touch and goes, I figure that I’ve overcome the anxiety. I decide to fly to the nearest airport, about 20 miles away. Once I get about 8 miles away I feel my heart starting to pull up in my throat and instant Lu I think, “what if I black out?!” So I turn around and decide that I just need to have another person with me and there’s no hope for ever flying alone. I have been so frustrated because there’s no reason for the anxiety. I’ve never blacked out or passed out while flying but for some reason I have that fear of losing control… this article explained the EXACT feelings and reasoning behind my issues. I always watch other pilots take off alone and wonder what’s wrong with me? Why can’t I just get in a plane and go?…
I am a 69 year old male,2500+ hour private/ instrument /mukti/ seaplane/tailwheel pilot that has had 5-6 of these events: first time flying over mountains w daughter( non pilot) to telluride when lost pitot heat/ started icing up with weather deteriating in a DA-42. Thought i was having a heart issue/ completed flight landed at tex and moved on; then it happened again entering light imc out of vmc on approach; final time was at 4000’: perfect vfr weather im the flatlands of Illinois .. absolutely no reason for it; i enroute thru a battery of physical tests; nothing at all wrong – in fact Xcellent condition .. during this 2 year span, a plane partner crashed in the backcountry of Idaho – died 100 days later of burns sustained ; another friend crashed in an Aerostar w wife and died ..
I’ve experienced all sorts of flight issues, always handled them… but this anxiety crap is tough: at this time, i am resigned to flying with another pilot, and all is fine .
The mind is a mysterious object..
Daniel,
How did that turn out for you? Overcome panic and successfully complete training? I ask because I am a quite nervous student pilot while flying solo. I figure the more I do it the more secure I’ll feel.
I remember a situation like the one referred by Bob meanwhile flying alone in a C172 at 4000 feet. Sudenly I was asking my selfe what am i doing here and turning down to the airport as fast as I can.