The Psychology of Fear of Flying: Why Losing Control Feels Worse at 40,000 Feet
By Dr. Katie Blake, PhD | Social & Cultural Psychologist, Travel Psychology Expert
I like driving. I like the attention it takes — hands on the wheel, eyes moving between mirrors, small constant corrections that leave me feeling like I’m the one steering my own outcome. Flying has never landed on me the same way. I trust a pilot. I trust the training, the redundancy, the thousands of hours of procedure sitting behind that closed cockpit door, and that trust does most of the psychological work for me before the plane ever leaves the gate.
But put me in the passenger seat of a car with someone I don't trust behind the wheel, and something in me tightens in a way I never experience when flying. Tailgating, late braking, a phone glanced at one too many times — I feel it in my chest before I've consciously registered why. I am not, it turns out, someone who's simply afraid of not being in control. I am someone who is very specifically attentive to who is in control, and whether I believe they're good at it.
That distinction sounds like a slight one. I don't think it is. Most conversations about fear of flying start from the assumption that the fear is about control itself — that flying is frightening because you're not driving, not choosing the route, not able to pull over. And that's part of it. But it doesn't explain why so many people, myself included, are perfectly calm handing control to a stranger in a uniform and distinctly uncalm handing it to someone they know personally, whose competence they can actually see and judge in real time. The fear isn't just about losing control. It's about who's holding it, and how much you trust the hands.
What the Research Actually Says About Fear of Flying
Fear of flying — aviophobia, in the clinical literature — is classified in the DSM-5 as a specific phobia: persistent, disproportionate fear tied to a defined situation, present for at least six months, and significant enough to interfere with someone's life. Estimates of how many people experience it vary enormously depending on how researchers define and measure it, ranging from roughly 2.5 percent up to 40 percent of the population in some surveys, which tells you almost as much about how slippery this fear is to pin down as it does about how common it is. What's consistent across the research is how the fear is felt more than its size. Researchers generally describe two or three overlapping profiles: people who fear the plane crashing, people whose fear is really claustrophobia — the confinement of the cabin, not the altitude — and a third group who fear something more circular, which is the panic response itself. Not the flight. The prospect of losing composure somewhere they can't leave.
That third group is the one I find most psychologically interesting, because it has almost nothing to do with airplanes. It's a fear about being trapped inside your own nervous system with no exit available, and flying just happens to be one of the more reliable places modern life puts people in that position.
It's also worth naming something researchers who study this have pointed out: fear of flying isn't really about the flight itself for most people who have it. It's about the anticipation. Researchers Frank Wilhelm and Walton Roth, studying the anxiety curve of people with flying phobia across an entire trip in 1997, found that people report elevated anxiety at every stage — anticipation, boarding, in-flight, landing — but that the highest self-reported anxiety consistently clustered around takeoff and turbulence, not the parts of the flight that are actually riskiest by any objective measure. The dread builds in the weeks before a trip, spikes at the airport, and for many people eases once the plane is actually in the air and there's nothing left to do but be in the situation. That pattern — anticipation as the sharpest part of the fear, not the event itself — shows up constantly in travel psychology more broadly, and it's one of the reasons fear of flying deserves to be treated as its own psychological territory rather than a footnote inside general anxiety research. It sits at the exact intersection of what I spend most of my time thinking about: how people anticipate, interpret, and psychologically prepare for travel, long before they ever reach the gate.
The Control Framework, and Where It Falls Short
The most useful starting point for understanding any of this is Julian Rotter's locus of control theory, first published in 1966. Rotter's basic distinction is between people who tend to believe outcomes are the result of their own actions — an internal locus of control — and people who tend to attribute outcomes to external forces: luck, fate, other people's decisions. It's one of the most replicated frameworks in social and personality psychology, and it shows up everywhere from health behavior to academic performance to, unsurprisingly, how people respond to handing over control of their own physical safety to someone else.
But locus of control on its own treats control as a single dial, and I don't think that quite gets to the heart of it, because it doesn't explain why the same person can feel entirely different about two situations that are, structurally, identical acts of relinquishing control. I don't drive the plane. I also don't drive my friend's car when she's behind the wheel. Rotter's framework predicts I should feel roughly the same unease in both cases, since in both I've handed the wheel — literal or figurative — to someone else. I don't. And I don't think I'm unusual in that.
Primary Control, Secondary Control, and the Skill Nobody Teaches You
This is where a different, less commonly cited piece of research does more for explaining the mechanism behind fear of flying: Fred Rothbaum, John Weisz, and Samuel Snyder's 1982 model of primary and secondary control. Their argument is that human beings actually operate with two distinct control strategies, not one. Primary control is the one most people mean when they talk about "being in control" — acting directly on the environment to bring it in line with what you want. Gripping the wheel. Choosing the route. Braking early. Secondary control is different. It's the internal work of adjusting yourself to fit a situation you can't directly change — reframing, accepting, recalibrating your own response rather than the external conditions.
Both are legitimate forms of control. Neither is more psychologically "real" than the other. But they are not equally trained — and Rothbaum, Weisz, and Snyder's original model goes further than just naming the two strategies. Their research describes primary and secondary control as operating in a sequence of sorts. People generally reach for primary control first, because it's the more culturally rehearsed move, and shift toward secondary control only when primary control genuinely isn't available. The problem is that shift itself is a skill. Some people move between the two fluidly. Others get stuck reaching for a lever that isn't there, which is functionally what a lot of in-flight panic looks like from the inside — a nervous system still trying to execute primary control strategies (brace, monitor, intervene) in a situation that has already, structurally, taken primary control off the table.
Weisz, Rothbaum, and Timothy Blackburn extended this into a cross-cultural argument in 1984, in a paper with a title I still think about — "Standing Out and Standing In." Their finding, since replicated and extended by researchers working across individualist and collectivist cultural contexts, is that primary control is culturally privileged in the West as the legitimate, effortful, adult form of control, while secondary control tends to get treated, without much scrutiny, as a fallback — something you settle for when primary control isn't available, rather than a skill in its own right. In cultural contexts that lean more interdependent, the picture is more balanced: secondary control is practiced, valued, and understood as an equally sophisticated response to a world that doesn't always let you act on it directly. This isn't a small academic distinction. It shapes, from early in life, which control muscle a person actually gets to develop.
I spent my doctoral work inside a closely related idea — Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama's research on independent and interdependent self-construal, which describes how differently people across cultures locate the self in relation to their environment and the people around them. Reading the primary-secondary control research alongside that work, the throughline is hard to miss. If you were raised inside a culture — and most Western psychological research, it's worth saying, comes from what researchers call WEIRD samples: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic populations, which are not representative of how most of the world's people actually think about selfhood and control — that treats primary control as the only real form of agency, you likely never got much practice at the other one. You know how to act on a situation. You were never taught how to sit inside one you can't act on and stay regulated anyway.
Flying requires exactly that second skill, on a fixed schedule, with no early exit. That's a genuinely hard thing to summon for someone who has spent a lifetime only building the first one.
Why the Driver in the Car Matters More Than the Pilot in the Cockpit
Here's where my own observation about driving and flying stops being a personal quirk and starts pointing at something the control research doesn't fully cover on its own — and I want to be clear that this next part is my own framing, not an established academic term, even though I think it's consistent with what the research above suggests.
Primary control isn't just about who's steering. It's about whether you trust the person steering to be competent — and trust, it turns out, behaves very differently depending on whether it's aimed at an institution or at an individual you can personally evaluate.
A pilot is, functionally, anonymous. You don't know their name, their track record, their bad days. What you're trusting isn't a person — it's a system: training standards, redundant instrumentation, an entire regulatory and procedural apparatus built to make individual human error survivable. That's an abstract, institutional kind of trust, and it turns out to be remarkably easy to extend, precisely because there's no individual competence to sit around evaluating in real time.
A driver you know is the opposite. You can see their attention drift. You can watch them brake half a second later than you would have. There's no institutional buffer between their competence and your safety — just their judgment, live, in front of you, and your own accumulated read on how good that judgment tends to be. That's a much harder kind of trust to hold steady, because it's personal and constantly re-evaluated rather than granted once and left alone.
I think this is a big part of why fear of flying and unease as a car passenger don't actually correlate the way people assume they should. They're not the same fear wearing two different costumes. One is about trusting a system you can't see. The other is about trusting a person you can.
Why Turbulence Feels So Much Worse Than It Is
Turbulence deserves its own attention here, because it's the single moment where all of this — control, trust, anticipation — collides most sharply. Wilhelm and Roth's research on the anxiety curve of a flight found that self-reported fear peaks precisely when turbulence hits, which makes sense given everything above: turbulence is the moment a flight stops feeling procedural and starts feeling unpredictable. The plane moves in a way you didn't choose for it to, can't anticipate, and have no way to counteract, all at once. That's primary control being denied in its most physical, immediate form.
The actual danger is close to nonexistent. Data from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, which oversees millions of passengers daily, has recorded well under 200 serious turbulence-related injuries across more than a decade of flights, and the overwhelming majority of those involved crew members who were up and moving through the cabin, not seated, buckled passengers. For someone in their seat with a seatbelt fastened, the actual risk turbulence poses is about as close to zero as risk gets in ordinary life.
What makes turbulence frightening isn't the statistics. It's that it's one of the only moments in a flight where the absence of primary control becomes physically undeniable — you can feel the plane doing something you have no say in, in real time, with your body registering it before your rational mind has a chance to remind you what the numbers actually say. Understanding that gap between what your body is reacting to (loss of control) and what's actually happening (a routine, survivable, well-understood atmospheric event) doesn't make the sensation disappear. But it does let you locate the fear correctly, which is often the first real step toward not being ruled by it.
Building Your Own Relationship With the Fear
None of this is a treatment protocol, and I want to be honest about that — I'm a social and cultural psychologist, not a clinician, and if fear of flying is significantly limiting your life, a therapist trained in exposure-based approaches is genuinely the right resource, not an article. But understanding the backbone of the fear does change your relationship to it, even without a formal intervention.
A few reframes I'd offer, drawn directly from the research above:
Notice which fear you're actually having. Is it the crash itself, the confinement, or the fear of your own panic response with no exit? They call for different responses, and most people have never separated them. This can also help you articulate any support you need from a trained professional.
Name what kind of control you're being asked to practice. Flying doesn't remove your capacity for control. It removes your access to primary control and asks you to lean on secondary control instead — the underused muscle, not the missing one.
Locate what you're actually trusting. If it's an institution — the airline, the pilot, the entire apparatus of commercial aviation — notice that this is a different, and statistically very well-founded, category of trust than the kind you extend to an individual driver you can personally watch and judge.
Practice secondary control somewhere lower-stakes. Sitting in a waiting room without your phone. Being a passenger with someone you already trust. Small, low-cost rehearsals of the skill primary-control cultures rarely ask you to build deliberately.
When turbulence hits, separate the sensation from the story. The movement is real. The danger your body is narrating from that movement is not. Naming that gap out loud, even silently to yourself, is often enough to keep a nervous system from fully committing to a primary-control response it has no way to execute at 40,000 feet.
I still like to be in the driver seat. That hasn't changed, and I don't think it necessarily needs to. What's changed is that I no longer read my own comfort in the driver's seat as evidence that I have a "control problem" I need to fix. It's evidence that I was raised, like most people in this cultural context, with one control skill built out further than the other — and that flying, more than almost anything else in ordinary life, asks travelers to reach for the one that's had the least practice.
What This Has to Do With Travel, Not Just Flying
It would be easy to read all of this as a piece about airplanes specifically, and I don't think that reads the full picture. Flying is just the most concentrated version of something travel requires of people constantly: relinquishing primary control and trusting a system, a person, or a place you didn't build and can't fully evaluate in advance. You hand your safety to a pilot you'll never meet. You hand your itinerary to a train schedule in a language you don't speak. You hand your sense of direction to a city that doesn't organize itself the way your own does. Travel is, structurally, a long series of small exercises in secondary control, whether or not anyone frames it that way.
I'd argue this is part of why travel feels psychologically significant even when nothing goes wrong. It's not only the new sights or the change of scenery. It's that travel puts people, repeatedly and on a schedule they don't fully control, into situations that require the control skill their home culture trained them least in. That's uncomfortable. It's also, I think, part of why so many people come back from a trip changed in ways they can't quite articulate. They practiced something at 40,000 feet, and in train stations, and in unfamiliar cities, that they never got much practice at closer to home. If you want the fuller picture of how travel does this — not just through control, but through identity, memory, and the brain itself — I've laid that out in What Is Travel Psychology? The Complete Guide to the Science of Why We Travel.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is fear of flying more common in certain personality types? The research doesn't point to a single "fear of flying personality," but locus of control and a strong preference for primary control strategies both appear to make the discomfort of flying — where control is largely unavailable — harder to tolerate.
Why do some people fear flying but not driving, even though driving is statistically far more dangerous? Statistical risk and felt risk are not the same system. Driving offers continuous primary control and personally evaluable trust; flying offers neither, which makes it feel riskier even when the numbers say otherwise.
Does culture really affect how afraid people are of flying? Cross-cultural research on primary and secondary control suggests that cultures placing heavy value on primary control may leave people less practiced at the secondary control flying requires — though fear of flying itself hasn't been directly studied across cultures at scale, so this is an extrapolation from the underlying control research rather than a direct finding.
Is turbulence actually dangerous? For seated, buckled passengers, no — serious turbulence-related injuries are exceedingly rare relative to the volume of flights, and the sensation of danger is almost entirely a mismatch between what your body registers as loss of control and what the aircraft is actually built to withstand.
Is it possible to feel better about flying without formal exposure therapy? Understanding the source of the discomfort can genuinely shift someone's relationship to it, but for fear significant enough to limit travel or daily life, a clinician trained in exposure-based treatment may be the appropriate next step.
Dr. Katie Blake is a social and cultural psychologist, travel psychologist, and writer based in the USA. She is the founder of The Postcard Société and the publisher of Psychologie, a publication on travel psychology, identity, and the art of living with intention. She works with individual travelers and leading travel and hospitality brands on psychology-informed experiences and campaigns. Available for media inquiries, expert commentary, podcast appearances, and brand collaborations — visit drkatieblake.com/press.