Why every plane incident feels like proof you were right to be scared

An ACT-based perspective on flying anxiety, media bias, and how to care for yourself today

⚠️ Trigger Warning: This post discusses a recent aviation incident involving fatalities. Please read at your own pace, and come back when you feel ready.

By Dr Kristy Potter, Clinical Psychologist

Last night, an Air Canada regional flight arriving into New York's LaGuardia Airport collided with a fire truck on the runway. Lives were lost. The investigation is ongoing and details are still emerging.

If you're a nervous flyer, there's a good chance you woke up this morning and felt your stomach drop when you saw the headline. Or maybe you've been avoiding the news all day, because some part of you already knew it would do exactly that.

This post is for you. Not to talk you out of what you're feeling. Not to tell you that flying is safe and you shouldn't worry. But to help you understand what's happening in your mind right now and to offer some things that might genuinely help today.

Why this feels like proof

Your brain is doing something very predictable right now. Two things, actually, and they work together.

The first is confirmation bias. If you already hold the belief that flying is dangerous, an incident like last night's doesn't feel like new information. It feels like vindication. See? I knew it. Your mind finds the evidence it was already looking for, and weighs it heavily. The 45,000 or so commercial flights that landed without incident last night don't get the same airtime in your head, because they don't fit the story your brain is already telling.

The second is availability bias. We tend to judge how likely something is by how easily we can picture it. Vivid, emotionally activating images, a damaged aircraft, emergency vehicles on a runway, become disproportionately memorable. When your mind tries to assess "how dangerous is flying?", it reaches for the most accessible examples. And right now, those examples are all over your news feed.

Together, these two biases create a powerful and self-reinforcing loop. The belief makes you attend to incidents. The vividness makes danger feel common. Which strengthens the belief. Which sharpens your attention to the next one.

This is not irrationality. It is a very normal feature of how human cognition works, and particularly under stress.

Knowing this probably doesn't make the fear go away

And that's not a failure on your part.

A lot of content aimed at nervous flyers tries to reason people out of their anxiety; statistics, physics, reassurance. For some people, some of that is useful. But for many anxious flyers, the fear returns the moment another headline appears, and they're left feeling like they've failed, or like their anxiety is uniquely resistant to logic.

It isn't. Anxiety doesn't operate primarily in the rational part of your brain. It operates in a much older, faster, more automatic system and one that evolved to keep you alive, not to weigh up probability distributions.

When you see footage of a damaged aircraft, your brain's threat-detection system activates. Stress hormones are released. Your attention narrows. Your mind begins scanning for further evidence of danger. And crucially this system doesn't distinguish well between being in danger and reading about danger. So while you are sitting safely at home, your nervous system may be responding as though the threat is immediate and personal.

This is not weakness. This is a nervous system doing exactly what it's designed to do.

What ACT offers instead

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy doesn't ask you to feel calm. It doesn't ask you to argue yourself out of the anxiety or prove it wrong. It starts from a different place entirely.

ACT invites you to notice the fear, to hold it with a little more distance, and then, when you're ready, to make choices based on your values rather than your threat responses.

The core question isn't how do we switch this off? It's: can you make room for this feeling, and still move toward what matters to you?

That's a meaningful distinction. Because the goal was never to feel nothing. The goal is to stop letting fear make all your decisions.

Some things that might actually help today

These aren't about eliminating the anxiety, that's not the aim here, and it's not realistic today. They're about giving it slightly less grip, so you can get through the day a little more gently.

1. Acknowledge how hard today is — really Before anything else: this is genuinely difficult. If you're struggling today, that doesn't mean you haven't made progress. It means you're a person with a fear of flying, and the news cycle just handed you exactly the kind of content your nervous system finds most threatening. That's not weakness. Be kind to yourself about it.

2. Notice without merging Your mind is probably generating a lot of frightening thoughts right now. Try observing them as mental events rather than facts — "I notice my mind is predicting the worst" is a genuinely different relationship to a thought than simply believing it. You don't have to stop the thoughts. Just try not to follow them down every path they want to take you.

3. Name the bias when you spot it When your brain says "see, flying IS dangerous" — gently name what's happening. "That's my confirmation bias finding the evidence it was already looking for." It won't silence the thought, but naming a cognitive process loosens its grip just enough to create a little space.

4. Try this right now if you're spiralling Place both feet flat on the floor. Feel the weight of your body in the chair. Look around the room and name five things you can see — out loud if you can. Take one slow breath, letting the exhale be longer than the inhale. This isn't about fixing anything. It's just about bringing your nervous system back to the present moment, where you are actually safe, for thirty seconds.

5. Step away from the news You don't need to keep watching to be informed, or to honour what happened. Repeatedly returning to distressing coverage keeps your threat system activated long after the initial spike. Closing the tab is not avoidance — it's self-care. Give yourself permission to step away.

6. Defuse from the feeling Rather than "I am terrified of flying," try "I'm noticing fear showing up right now." This small shift, what ACT calls cognitive defusion, creates some breathing room between you and the emotion. Not suppression. Just a little perspective.

7. Come back to what matters to you When you're ready, not now, if now is too hard, ask yourself: is there somewhere you want to go? Someone you want to see? A version of your life that includes the freedom to travel? That's your values speaking. The fear is real. And so is that. ACT holds both as true simultaneously, and asks which one you want guiding your choices and not today, but in general.

A note on grief

Whatever the full facts that emerge, real people were affected by last night's incidentm, for crew, passengers, airport workers, and their families. It is entirely possible to hold both things at once: genuine sorrow for those involved, and your own fear and anxiety about flying. They're not in conflict. You don't have to sort your feelings into neat categories today.

Be gentle with yourself. You're allowed to find this hard.

— Dr Kristy