Four deadly U.S. aviation disasters in Alaska, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C., in two weeks. A fireball crash landing and an upside-down halt on a snowy runway in Toronto. A fire on a wing during a takeoff at a Houston airport. A taxiing jet clipping a parked airplane in Seattle.

The dramatic risks of airline travel have made spectacular headlines this year, sometimes within days of each other. These incidents, without their emotional components, are data added to the research of organizations such as the National Safety Council, Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Board. The organizations’ collective assessment? Flying is safe.

In fact, the National Safety Council, the Illinois-based public service organization with a mission to promote and improve the country’s health and safety, details that flying remains the safest of all travel options. Aviation travel is grouped with railroad travel and being struck by lightning in the category of “too few deaths to calculate odds.”

A recent report from the International Air Transport Association reported “on average, a person would have to travel by air every day for 103,239 years to experience a fatal accident.”

Still, the statistics mean little to those who have flying anxiety, more commonly called a fear of flying. The spate of air travel accidents confirms for many that their apprehension of air travel is rational. It’s not.

“Yes, there were a bunch of accidents, and it was unsettling,” says Andrew Rosen, founder of the Center for Treatment of Anxiety and Mood Disorders headquartered in Delray Beach. “But that doesn’t mean that it’s dangerous. There are millions of flights. You just have to disregard what your anxious brain is telling you.”

Florida has among the country’s most frequent flying population. According to the Florida Department of Transportation, the state’s aviation system features 11 military aviation facilities and more than 125 public-use airports, including 21 airports offering commercial service spanning the Panhandle to the Florida Keys.

In 2024, Florida welcomed a record-breaking 142.9 million visitors, with 40.7% arriving via airports, according to Visit Florida. Locally, Southwest Florida International Airport saw 11,028,182 passengers during that same time period, according to Lee County Port Authority.

Rosen, a board-certified clinical psychologist whose clientele includes patients from throughout Southwest Florida, cited studies that detail about 20% of the population is anxious when flying.

“It’s probably even larger than that,” says Rosen. “Those people are thrilled when they land, and they can be done with it. So, when anything happens that would reinforce the irrational idea that flying is a dangerous thing and you have to be lucky to survive it; then it becomes dangerous to the anxious brain and it says, ‘You see?’”

The Anxiety & Depression Association of America, headquartered in Silver Spring, Maryland, is an international nonprofit member organization dedicated to the prevention, treatment and cure of anxiety, depression and other disorders. Martin N. Seif, a founding board member, offers an eight-step approach to overcoming the fear of flying. With the self-help guidelines offered by many organizations to address a fear of flying, the approaches are collectively categorized as “distractions.” Understanding the rational and the irrational components of fearful flying is imperative. Seif explains the concept as “boarding an airplane with knowledge.”

“Anxiety thrives on ignorance and feeds off ‘what if?’ catastrophic thought,” he writes. “But once you become knowledgeable, your ‘what if?’ thoughts are limited by the facts. Become familiar with the facts. They will not eliminate your anxiety, but they will help you manage it.”

According to experts, fear of flying is generally experienced by those who don’t like not being in control.  If a flier isn’t in charge, the only certainty is the unknown.

“We all like to feel in control, but some more than others,” says Rosen. “That’s probably the common denominator that people who have a fear of flying have. But flying is extremely safe behavior. When situations occur like this and it happens in bunches like this, it blows the whole fear thing out of the water. Now it feels like every plane potentially is going down. The average person who has a fear of flying would like to think that everything that can happen at random can eventually happen in bunches.”

The actual crashes, Rosen said, were unrelated, with nothing in common other than they were airplanes.