A colleague was once asked does he not get scared being a pilot. His response? "Yes. During the drive to work."
Seconded. As an airline pilot, the things that scare me the most are:
(a) Spiders
(b) Driving to work
As
sharpclassic says, turbulence is more of an inconvenience than a danger - aircraft fly through it every day, and can withstand far worse conditions than the average passenger will ever experience. They have to be built tough to withstand my landings.
For what it's worth, I believe that linking turbulence to the Air France crash is a bit of a red herring. The investigation is obviously at an early stage, however, most aircraft accidents do not have single cause but rather a chain of errors and/or failures and/or events which combine to result in a crash. I suspect that this one will prove to be no different, and that turbulence was - at worst -
a factor as opposed to
the cause.