Spice Island
Some years ago, as part of a pre-employment screening process. I had to go to a 3 day psychiatric analysis . During the 3 days we had multiple interviews with variously a psychiatrist, 2 psychologists and an ex DC10 Pilot who was also a psychologist.
The normal run of testing, psychometric, etc. Ended on the second day, the 3rd day was various interviews and a de-brief.
During the de-brief the DC10 guy told me, that their statistics had shown that a majority of pilots have a fear of flying at a subconscious level.
This fear is documented in the report sent to the hiring company. And that most companies never reveal any of the findings to the subject. Just make a decision as to hire or not, and then the file is encoded with a factor for records if hired, and then the main file is destroyed (Legal issue)
However, a few companies go through the report with the pilot if he’s been hired.
The biggest issue arising during this event is when the pilot is told he’s scared of flying. Naturally it doesn’t make sense to the pilot. If he/she were scared of flying, why would they seek a job as a pilot? …They’ve never felt fear of flying!
Apparently it’s there in many of us. Just at a deep level. The DC10 guy explained that in his old airline. They believed that any major life event could trigger this covert fear and had established a policy where anyone known to have been thru a listed event was automatically stood down for a period of time. This was done transparently, in the sense that you found yourself on a reserve bid or standby…
I can’t remember all the listed events, but mostly along the lines of divorce, death of a spouse or parent , major health scare etc…
His opinion was that the surfacing of this fear, driven by some kind of event. Would disappear as quickly as it came…No time scale given, but I got the impression it wouldn’t take too long once the emotions become regularized.
You don’t say if you’ve been thru one of these life events or not.
But hopefully, this will just be an episode, and one day soon you’ll wake up feeling fine..
All the best….170’