The word 'panic' refers to an encounter with the god Pan, doesn't it? A mere human is overwhelmed by the fearfulness of an encounter with such a powerful being: 'panic' fear results.
So you end up 'thirty thousand feet up, nothing on the clock but the maker's name, and that was in Bantu...' but of course none of us ever panic, or if we do we tend to push that memory into the back of the mind.
I sure wouldn't care to share any such moments of my own with someone named Trish who is supposedly working on a PhD. Might turn out to be a reporter for some tabloid; who knows?
I do remember once working with a survivor of a plane crash (when he had been the pilot-in-command). I found that this poor soul was just hanging on by his fingernails so that the first thing that went wrong saw him lose the plot. He would sit there telling me that everything from his end was going fine, but meanwhile that was the airport runway sliding past his side window, the runway we were supposedly lining up to land on.
It seemed pretty obvious that he was so overloaded with fear from his previous crash that he was unable to keep the mental balance necessary to strap an airplane to his ass and go flying. I told him to go get some psychiatric help before he hurt himself, advice he ignored, of course. Hey, he needed to work as a pilot, both for his self-image and for a daily crust. Light aircraft aviation isn't usually equipped to handle this sort of situation.