PHOENIX—Kimberly Mack took a free fear-of-flying class at Sky Harbor International Airport more than a decade ago and has relied on the tools she learned on every flight since.

On Monday, the 54-year-old Arizona small-business owner called Ron Nielsen, the retired airline captain who runs the classes, for a one-on-one refresher. Mack has a flight to Napa, Calif., later this month and considered canceling after last week’s devastating midair collision in Washington, D.C., and medical-jet crash in Philadelphia.

The guy she calls “Captain Ron” reassured her in a call that stretched over an hour. “He’s not like: Your fears aren’t valid. You have to remember things happen. It reiterated everything.”

You don’t have to be a nervous flier to be suddenly anxious about airline safety. The American Airlines-Black Hawk helicopter crash, which killed 67 people, was the worst aviation incident on U.S. soil in a generation. Frequent fliers as well as casual travelers are talking about it with their families and co-workers and airline crews are stunned.  

Nielsen, who runs a Phoenix-based business called Fearless Flight and has a master’s degree in professional counseling, saw it at his latest free airport class on Saturday night. He says a third of the attendees signed up because of the accident. 

“It doesn’t make people afraid but it elevates the fears that they’ve been repressing,” he says. “It activates their fear-of-flying gene.”

Dial a Pilot, an 18-month-old business run by a major airline pilot, has seen a “massive surge” in bookings for its $65, 30-minute sessions. “The calls were not necessarily centered on the accident, they were more centered on: I have this one fear. Is it valid?” says founder Kyle Koukol.

It is. But while I can help you navigate annoying airline seat fees, airport lounge restrictions and pesky carry-on bag rules, I’m not the right person to soothe your frayed flying nerves. That’s for the professionals.

So I turned to Nielsen, Koukol and licensed therapists for their coping strategies, though each said they don’t love dashing off tips because there is no one-size-fits-all strategy.

“It’s such a complex problem,” Nielsen says, but there are ways to manage your anxiety.

 

Use anxiety-management tools

Deep breathing is a big one, of course.

Nielsen is a big fan of distanced self-talk, a technique promoted by Ethan Kross, an experimental psychologist and neuroscientist and director of the Emotional and Self Control Lab at the University of Michigan. He wrote the book “Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It.”

The bottom line: You distance yourself emotionally from a situation. Nielsen says travelers can reframe a flight situation that scares them, like turbulence, by writing, “I hate this but I’ve been here before and I lived” over and over.

“You’re changing from negative cognitions to positive cognitions,” he says.

Read the full article on The Wall Street Journal.