Air France Crash

An Air France Airbus 330 went down on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris last night as it was crossing the equator.

We  don’t have enough info to speculate in a useful way. At this point, all speculation is wild speculation. Wild speculation only fuels anxiety for no benefit. Isn’t this the only jet airline to go down over the Atlantic in the last ten years?   The next job is to find the plane, and if the ocean is not too deep, recover the parts. Then, piece the plane together and figure out the cause. Then figure a fix for what caused it. That will take months if not years. And only after that time will significant information be available.

Are foreign-made airliners are crashing more? No. Here are stats from www.airsafe.com (number of fatal accidents per million flights):

A-300 0.54
A-310 1.27
A-320 0.13

Compare that to the 737 at 0.36, the 757 at 0.30, the 767 at 0.40. Based on those numbers, the A-320 compares favorably with all the Boeing-built planes.   Comparing the A-330/340 0.0 (obviously this accident is going to change that rate) with the 777. Until this accident, the A-330 was fatal accident-free. The 777 has had an accident but not a fatal one.

Speculation that lightning or storms caused the accident is completely irresponsible, and reporting that something "might" have caused the accident gets reporters a story. But any focus you give this speculation will only cause anxiety for no useful reason whatsoever.

We have no significant information whatsoever. My recommendation to people who are anxious about flying is to ignore media reports which speculate based on insignificant information. Focus on these reports will only cause anxiety about flying to increase when there is no valid reason for increased anxiety. 

Here is what happens. When a person first focuses on reports of a crash, the person's creates imagination of - or speculates on - what may have happened. Initially, this may be recognized as imagination, though it may masquerade in the mind as fact. But if the person repeatedly imagines what may have happened, this imagination is memorized, and thus recorded in the mind as fact. Thereafter, this false "fact" becomes the basis for terror which, to the person, seems entirely reasonable.

Bottom line: focus - at this point - on this accident is pointless.

We human beings are born with half of the emotion regulation system in place (the half that revs us up) and half of the system does not exist whatsoever (the half that calms us down). The brain system that will provide the ability to calm ones own self begins to develop at around eight months.

Until that time ALL calming the young child gets is from others, and often that calming is not adequate and the young child experiences terror and this terror is, amazingly, recorded in the brain forever.

Then, around ten months, the part of the brain that has the potential to become able to calm us starts to be available. At that point, the young child can, if conditions are good, begin to memorize what caregivers do to provide calming. And here is where the problem becomes critical: the only way a human learns to effectively self-calm is be memorizing the steps received from someone who is very, very good at providing calming.

Obviously, caregivers – regardless of how much they care – vary in their ability to tune in the the child and assure the child in a way that works. As a result, on a scale of zero to ten, a few of us get a “ten” level of ability to calm ourselves, and most of us get far less. People who get a “one” or a  “two” are the people who become addicts. Those of us in the middle have enough ability to calm ourselves that we can develop strategies to make up for what we were not given during those early formative months.

The strategies when dealing with uncertainty typically involve:

control
escape

Control: if we control a situation, we often believe (whether really true or not) that we can make sure everything works out OK, such as when driving a car. Though it is not nearly as safe as flying, we FEEL safer because our hands are on the wheel.

Escape: this means not only a way out if things don’t go well, but a way to maintain a certain distance, either physically or psychologically. Many anxiety fliers, even though they are on a plane, try to "escape" awareness of being on the plane in one way or another. When these measures fail, high anxiety or panic can result.

On the ground, we do OK. But when we get aboard a plane, we have no control and no escape. Frankly, all this does is put up back to the level of ability to regulate emotions we were originally given. But that ability originally given simply leaves us exposed to the terror of anything we can imagine. (There are reasons - too complex to explain here - that cause what we imagine to become so real that it causes terror.)

That is the problem. The the only way to prevent the feelings that cause you so must distress is to increase the calming that works unconsciously and automatically. Why? Because fear develops too fast for the rational mind to keep up and counter the feelings with reason. The mind can be trained to not react to thoughts of flying.

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