How I Beat Flight Anxiety, Again and Again
Honestly I Was A Wreck
Flying After an Aviation Disaster Is a Total Brain Pretzel
You do all this work—deep breathing, meditation, body scans, timing your caffeine intake like a NASA engineer—to confront your anxiety, to train yourself that fear does not, in fact, have to dominate the airwaves.
And then—bam—some female pilot pulls a full Tom Cruise and flies a commercial jet upside down, and another crash-parks her helicopter into a descending plane like she’s competing in the X Games: Aerial Disaster Edition.
And suddenly, all your progress is out the emergency exit.
Nathan, stop talking about these things, it makes me feel uncomfortable.
I Don’t Trust the FAA and Neither Should You
Look, I don’t trust the FAA. Not because I’m some tinfoil-hat-wearing, chemtrail-counting conspiracy theorist, but because I have actual conversations with seasoned pilots—the guys with white whiskers and a deadpan exhaustion that suggests they’ve seen some things.
And what they’ve told me? Not great.
This isn’t just about race—it’s about gender, too. The FAA, in its infinite wisdom, decided that the best way to diversify aviation was to lower the standards for pilot certification by, oh, let’s say, a casual 90%.
One of these pilots—Air Force vet, 20 years on the Airbus, then a lead trainer for young pilots—flat-out told me he was terrified to fly American Airlines.
Not because he’s some bitter old guy ranting about “back in my day”, but because his bosses (who, let’s be clear, have never flown a plane in their lives) kept pushing him to pass pilots who weren’t ready.
“We need the numbers.”
Numbers. Not competence, not safety, just representation quotas with wings.
Bro literally said: “I always check the cockpit before getting on an American flight.”
Let me repeat that. A guy who literally trains pilots for a living is now checking to make sure the person flying his plane doesn’t look like they got their license from a Cracker Jack box.
Things You Didn’t Need to Know, Vol. 1.
And it’s not just one guy. Three separate Delta pilots told me the same thing, but with slightly less "we’re all going to die" energy:
“Flying a plane is like driving a bus. It doesn’t take much talent. That’s kind of the problem. We have more bus drivers now and fewer pilots.”
I don’t know if you’ve ever ridden a city bus, but let’s just say this is not the comparison that makes me feel great about modern air travel.
Affirmative Action in the Cockpit Helps No One
Now, before anyone tries to cancel me, let me be very clear—women and Black people aren’t bad pilots. Never have been.
The problem isn’t diversity. The problem is artificially forcing diversity at the expense of competence.
This actually hurts talented Black pilots and female pilots, because now, every time something goes wrong, people wonder if they were actually qualified or if they just checked the right demographic boxes.
Back in the 90s, nobody cared if their pilot was a woman or Black because nobody wondered how they got the job.Now? Thanks to the diversity-industrial complex, we’re all sitting here asking, “Wait… did they actually qualify for this?”
That is not progress. That is undermining trust in the very people you’re supposedly trying to uplift.
So here’s how I eradicated flight anxiety in its totality:
