The answer to all of these questions is an emphatic no! Being a little nervous doesn't mean anything except that maybe we're letting our common sense nibble a little too hard at our enthusiasm. A little apprehension is good. And it's natural. After all, the only environment for which the human species is less suited for survival than being up in the air is being under water. We're not physically equipped to cope with either situation without a huge amount of help from accompanying machinery. So, a little apprehension keeps us safe by continually reminding us that a lack of focus on our part can have major consequences.
Most pilots have periods when our confidence slips. Even the professionals have bad days when confidence in their abilities or their flying machines stumbles a notch or two. The big difference between the pros and the rest of us is that the professionals have to keep flying. Their livelihood depends on it. For that reason they have some very strong incentives to keep an emotional hang-up from standing in the way of getting the job done safely. That doesn't mean, however, that they'll bulldoze right through an emotional problem that compromises safety. Knowing when to fly- and when not to - is as important as knowing how to fly.
When we're feeling uptight, most of us will hold back and cancel a flight rather than push forward, because we're not being forced to fly. This is when apprehension can build inertia, become fear, and - if left unchecked - can keep growing until it becomes debilitating. This kind of apprehension feeds on itself and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As any motivational speaker will tell you, these kinds of subtle, irrational fears are not only common throughout life, but they have to be watched carefully to keep them from gaining the upper hand. They shouldn't be allowed to run your life, but sometimes that's not as easy as it sounds.
In the case of flying, problems caused by yielding to apprehension are more obvious than in other aspects of life. In aviation, letting apprehension make too many of our go/no-go decisions invariably causes us to start inventing reasons to not fly. We may go out to the airport and hang out in the pilots' lounge, but maybe "there's too much wind," or "I don't like the looks of those clouds," or we come up with any of a dozen other reasons that will keep us on the ground where we're safe. On the ground we don't have to face our fears, however illogical we know them to be.
Of course, if we don't fly, guess what? Every single time we find a reason stay on the ground our proficiency clicks another notch downhill. Apprehension doesn't usually make us unsafe, but not flying certainly does. Safety in aviation is a direct result of keeping our currency and proficiency as high as possible, and that is very much driven by how often we fly. On top of that, proficiency itself is driven by how often we challenge our skills by pushing at the edges of our skill envelopes. If we're letting apprehension force us to huddle in the corner, we certainly aren't out there challenging ourselves. The net result is that no matter what skill level we had at the beginning, the more we let apprehension chase us away from the airport, the more we are going to slip down the proficiency ladder until what we were concerned about at the beginning is no longer imaginary. At some point what we're worried about becomes real simply because we're letting our apprehension keep us grounded.
Are we saying that people shouldn't be afraid? No, we're not. In fact, fears and apprehension, even when they're illogical, are still very real to the person feeling them. From the outside we may say it's silly to feel that way, but from the inside there is no choice. No one wakes up and says, "I think I'll feel apprehensive about flying today." It just happens. Sometimes it's kicked off by an ugly incident. Maybe a particularly nasty crosswind hammered you and made a landing a real dry-mouth affair. Or maybe some weather squeezed you close to the trees and spooked you. Or maybe you were flying along and your mind began picturing all those engine parts beating against one another and you began wondering how long the engine can take that kind of torture before it fails.
Moving out of your comfort zone can cause apprehension, too. It's amazing how comfortable we all become at our home airport and in our usual airplanes. This is illogical too, because when you sit down and analyze it, a runway should be just a runway, no matter where it's located, what surrounds it, or what it looks like. But that's not the case, is it? New airports and new runways always have a certain amount of "strange" attached to them, which breeds apprehension. And then there's the strangeness attached to flying an unfamiliar airplane. Again, it's part of the "un-comfort zone" that any new situation generates. Anything new will have a period of time attached to it during which you're apprehensive. However, you can't let that emotion drag out the period of adjustment indefinitely.
It doesn't make any difference where apprehension or fear comes from, or how illogical it may be. What does make a difference is what you do about it. Squarely face down any apprehension or fear and deal with it. Fortunately, in nearly all cases, the cure is relatively easy, although it may take some intestinal fortitude to get started.
The first step is to look at yourself and make an honest assessment of why you haven't been flying more recently. You may be saying that you don't have the money, or the weather hasn't been very good, or you've had a lot of Little League games lately-all of which may be absolutely true. However, look at your reasons carefully and make sure they aren't floating on a subtle foundation of apprehension. It's not unusual for us to be nervous about flying and not even realize it. If we like to fly, but we aren't, we should listen very closely to our excuses and make sure we aren't fooling ourselves. Then we have to make up our minds to do something about it.
The good news is that in 95 percent of the cases, the cure for the problem is nothing more than climbing into the cockpit and going flying. Simple as that. Normally, once we've actually set ourselves in motion, everything goes easy after that.
One of the best ways to attack the problem is to make a plan and set a few goals. Maybe we'll tell ourselves that this weekend we're going to make 25 landings on three different airports and we're not going to let anything stop us from accomplishing that goal. We have to tell ourselves that we're going to enforce the plan because it's so easy to let something else get in the way, which is another way of giving in to our apprehension.
The forgoing naturally assumes that you haven't been cowering in a corner for so long that you actually aren't safe - or legal - to fly. In that case, the obvious first move is a call to your CFI. As far as that goes, if your apprehension level is causing even the smallest amount of anxiety, just say to heck with it and drop a dime on a flight instructor. If a flight instructor is part of the equation but you are still uptight, then maybe what you fear is flying itself, not a fear of you flying. In that case, your skill is not a factor, and your problem then is dealing with flight itself.
When making the appointment with your CFI, level with him. Tell him up front that you haven't been flying lately and you're a little worried about it. Don't try to bluff your way through and say that you just need a little brushing up. Be honest so that he knows what he's dealing with. If a CFI understands that you're on edge about the whole project, he or she will approach it differently. What you need is a kinder, gentler CFI, not one with an aggressive, "Come on, I'll really show you how to fly" mindset. If you tell him or her exactly what you're feeling, any CFI worthy of the title will sympathize with your plight and work with you to solve it.
When you are doing the self-evaluation, hopefully you determined exactly what it is that's bugging you. That will make the entire rehabilitation project easier because there will be specific items to be worked on, whether you're seeking a CFI's help or not. The number-one item on the top of all I'm-afraid-to-fly lists is crosswinds. Fortunately, crosswinds and crosswind landings are also the easiest of all ap- prehension-causing factors to deal with.
Crosswinds are nothing more than a fact of aviation life, but they haunt a lot of folks when they really shouldn't. This isn't to say that you should fly in any wind or you're a chicken. What it does say, however, is that you should fly in enough different kinds of winds that you develop an innate understanding of what makes one wind bad and another one good. Reading wind is a lot like reading clouds. Just as we intuitively know to steer well clear of thunderstorms, while stratus or cirrus clouds are simply something to keep out of, we can learn to read winds the same way and set our own limits.
If crosswinds are keeping us out of the air, then you go out and start challenging them. Face them and beat them. If you're unsure of yourself, get your CFI to ride along and offer words of advice and encouragement. The unfortunate thing about crosswind training is that we sometimes don't get a crosswind in which to practice, and when we do, it's generally the same kind of wind throughout an entire hour of flight training. So, you have to look at the different kinds of crosswinds (stable, gusty, directionally variable, nasty and sharp-edged, etc.) and try to schedule an hour in each of them to not only learn how to fly in each, but how to read them ahead of time.
In the same way that we approach crosswinds to gain confidence, we need to attack any other problem-causing factors. If you won't fly when it's overcast or the weather is questionable, get out there with your CFI and challenge some marginal conditions so that you learn how to read cloud cover and how to avoid the bad ones. If going to unfamiliar airports makes the hair on your neck stand up, spend an hour bouncing from airport to airport, shooting at least two landings on each. If a fear of getting lost keeps you shackled to your home airport, do a little post-graduate training in cross-countries. Consider flying one leg at 1,000 feet above ground level, to simulate what it would be like to look for an airport if lowering clouds were forcing you to land.
The goal in all of this is to assess what it is that's keeping you out of the air and then fix it by either challenging it personally or going after it with a CFI's help. Just because you don't feel you're up to the challenge is not a valid reason to stay on the ground. None of what we do in aviation is unbelievably difficult or reserved for supermen. Also, don't think that you're alone in feeling nervous, because you're definitely not. From time to time apprehension attacks all of us. Just know that it's easily reversible. So, how many landings did you decide you were going to do this weekend? Was it 25 or 30?
Budd Davisson is an aviation writer/photographer and magazine editor who has written approximately 2,200 articles and has flown more than 300 different types of aircraft. A CFI for 36 years, he teaches about 30 hours a month in his Pitts S-2A Special.
