Scared of mid-airs

"Roger" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 11 May 2006 00:57:11 GMT, "Dudley Henriques"
wrote:

It's that "developing" that concerns me and I have to wonder what
would have triggered such a response after several hundred hours. Of
course there is such a thing as thinking about negative consequences
too much and conditioning one's self to reinforce feelings we didn't
realize were there. It would be my opinion that it's time to spend
some time with a good instructor to find out why and to allay those
fears and turn them into thoughtful concern. Done early this sort of
thing is far, far easier to handle than later after it's had a chance
to become entrenched.

This is true.
I have had several occasions in my career when I began to have doubts about
my ability to survive the airshow demonstration venue. I know it happens to
"normal" pilots as well. Usually it's exposure to an element of risk that
for some reason you never actually considered as a high risk factor before.
It causes you to step back and re-evaluate your exposure to risk.
This is a key moment in a pilot's career if it ever happens. Most of the
time it doesn't happen and you just continue on flying, but if you are
exposed suddenly to something traumatic like witnessing a crash, the effect
can be profound in some pilots. This is a point where individual
personalities take hold. Most of us who fly, especially those of us who have
flown professionally are deeply into deductive reasoning (even if we don't
know it :-) and adjust to this kind of exposure by rationalization.
I know I've watched many of my friends killed in airshow crashes. My
rationalization of these incidents was such that I recognized the errors
involved and took necessary steps to avoid making these same errors myself,
or in the case of structrual failures, I rethought my own maintainence
program and adjusted. My bottom line on fear was that I avoided it through
rationalization that barring catestrophic events, I was in control of my own
fate in the air.
I think this works well for the everyday pilot also.
Any normal deductive reasoning by a pilot should yield the rationalization
that if a serious effort is made by a pilot to avoid trouble, barring
catestrophic event, the odds are extremely favorable that one can fly an
airplane through an entire lifetime and emerge safely at the other end of
the road.
For the pilot concerned about the possibility of a mid-air; the best way to
avoid having a mid-air is simply to AVOID having a mid-air.
Dudley