Completely agree with you. I fly tons for work, and was just fine until I got into my mid-late twenties when I started to have horrible anxiety.

And like you, I don't necessarily fear death, but I definitely don't want to see death coming. More than anything, I fear helplessness.

When I was a teen (long time ago) I remember telling my dad that I thought it would be great to take a flight with many stops because that way we got to takeoff and land multiple times! What fun! A bit later of course it became exactly the opposite and not just for time travel reasons, price or schedule.

Ditto. Was traveling for a living, and didn't care at all about it for years, then I got worse and worse, and had to change careers. I think part of it was the increase in stress overall after 9/11 in travelling, but maybe another part of it is doing it enough times, having enough unpleasant experiences that it's added up to me just hating everything that can happen on a typical flight.

Also, dropping 10-20 feet and seeing/feeling the frame of the aircraft flexing about is just plain unsettling.

> dropping 10-20 feet and seeing/feeling the frame of the aircraft flexing about is just plain unsettling.

If it helps, Boeing tests the wings to failure by mounting them to a diabolical torture device that bends them. They have to be bent near vertical before failure.

A little turbulence flapping the wings is about as dangerous as your car's suspension flexing over rough roads.

I used to be a white knuckle flyer until working at Boeing. Knowing how the systems are designed and how they work and how they are designed to be resistant to failure helped a great deal.

I tried to explain all this to a friend who was also a nervous nellie flyer, and he told me he didn't want to know - he felt safer with it being a black box.

Have you tried taking a flight lesson to see if it helps?