[The Goat]

Well i'm sort of heartened to hear someone else admit to a deathly fear of flying! Frost i'm really curious how yours got started? I'll tell you i grew up flying a ton cuz mom was a flight attendant for many years. Two things happened. In 1991 we left O'Hare for London and about an hour in the plane lost an engine. Policy is the plane turns around so we did. Then about 5 minutes from landing the fire alarms went off. We got landed in a hurry...very rough landing and the plane was shut down on the run way. Come to find out a cabin cooling system hadn't been filled w/ water and nearly started a fire...ever since then i thought about the other scenario, where the engine doesn't die and we have a cabin fire at 40 thousand feet. The second thing that made me terrified was a flight into Seattle a few years later in the worst storm i've ever seen. I got to see the snack cart bounce of the ceiling and hear people scream and pray. FUN!!!

But here's the thing I can fly today w/o panicking. Drugs never worked for me much but Matty's suggestion is a good one. I can't remember what i read years back but just recently i read Outliers, which talks about many of the things major airlines have done to make flying much, much safer than it used to be. That's the bottom line for me...the big carriers are really safe. I won't ride on smaller ones anymore.