Fearful flier faces the skies with an arsenal of apps

As a longtime travel writer, you would think that, for me, getting on a plane would be as routine as brushing my teeth. Whether it's a long haul to Asia, a transatlantic visit or a short hop from my home in Italy to another city in Europe, barely a week goes by that I am not catching a flight, or several.

Sadly, however, the frequency of heading to the airport has not cured me of my visceral fear of flying. It ebbs and flows. When crashes are not in the headlines and after a number of smooth, turbulence-free flights, I feel much calmer and am less likely to have catastrophic thoughts.

But following tragic incidents like the Germanwings crash in March 2015, the disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines jet one year before that, or the Air France flight from Rio de Janeiro that crashed into the Atlantic in 2009, I have tended to be on high alert. I board planes but I really wish I didn't have to.

So I was curious about an app that was launched in 2015, which is aimed to show, scientifically, just how safe air travel really is. Called (obviously with a sense of humor) "Am I Going Down?" the app (which costs $2.99) indicates the statistical chance of something catastrophic happening on board, based on the aircraft model, airline flown and the departure and arrival airports (which you enter on a screen in a palette of calming green and yellow colors).

"My wife was on an incredibly turbulent flight on its way to Australia," explained Nic Johns, a Londoner who developed the app, "and her fear of flying was triggered from that incident. It got so bad that we couldn't fly anywhere, and we were taking a train to places like Italy and Spain from London, which was obviously a huge time commitment."

Johns set out to offer his wife, and others who shared her fear, comfort through concrete numbers. Making use of his degree in mathematics and statistics, he scoured and accrued safety records to come up with his percentages; in Britain he used records from the Bureau of Aircraft Accidents and Archives, and in the United States from the National Transportation Safety Board.

"I gathered all the data on all the crashes that were on record, and more importantly all the safe flights, and put together the data, and odds of a fatality in this app," he said. "In most cases a normal flight will give you a one in 5 million, or one in 10 million, chance of crashing, so that tends to reassure most people."

Some of this tech help, in the form of apps, has actually grown out of fear of flying programs in classroom-like settings and their auxiliary websites.

Rebecca Misner, a senior editor at Condé Nast Traveler, said the website fearofflying.com helped her a great deal with her anxiety with nuts and bolts information on everything from how aircraft work mechanically to turbulence.

"There was something very methodical and no-nonsense about the website that I found reassuring," Misner wrote. "It was sort of bizarre — the first time I flew after using the site, I was totally calm, like a different person."

The founder of the Fear of Flying on-the-ground program and website, Capt. Tom Bunn, a former Air Force and commercial pilot for United Airlines and Pan Am, offers his techniques on a smartphone application called SOAR, Seminars on Aeroanxiety Relief. It is an offshoot of the counseling he offers by phone to nervous passengers to prepare them before they go on a trip, and once onboard (with in-person or phone counseling for $199; some resources are free).

The free app offers explanations for basic aspects of aviation like takeoff and descent, and a tool to measure the G-force in turbulence, which shows passengers that the aircraft is well within the range to withstand any bumps — moments that particularly unnerve skittish fliers. But the captain's approach mixes technology with face-to-face interaction.

Soon after talking to Johns and Bunn, I had a chance to test whether their apps, and others, were of any help to me. On a flight to London from Italy, I used "Am I Going Down?" To be honest, it made my anxiety spike sharply before the flight because I felt as if I was somehow tempting fate by even entering the data: that I was on an Airbus A380 Ryan Air flight from Perugia to London Standsted Airport.