Addressing fear of flying
Thank you, Tim and Sam. I totally agree with you that fear of flying (be it flying in airliners or in single-engine airplanes) is an emotion and that it cannot be tamed by statistics.
To be perfectly honest, the main audience of my article was Boeing employees. When being exposed for the first time to the idea of homebuilts, their question of "Is it safe?" is not the nervous question of someone about to ride an airplane for the first time (or about to go bungee-jumping or skydiving). It will be a more cold and detached question asked from an engineering or even legal point of view, as in "My company is sponsoring some employees to build and fly a kitplane. Should I be worried? What are the odds of this ending catastrophically?". I do think that this kind of concern can be addressed by statistics, so I provided them (and links to the Nall reports, which I agree are terrific).
When it comes to the average person's fears, on the other hand, my take on it is what I explain in forums like this:
http://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/1ktd00/i_need_your_help_on_safety_datastatistics/cbslayf
http://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/co...ne_who_flies_regularly_and_has_always/ceft4rq
In short: If people can easily imagine scary accidents in single-engine airplanes (to the point where the image of the scary accident over-rides anything else in their mind when they think about - or engage in - riding such vehicles) then they will FEEL like it's a big risk, whether or not that's true. And the same thing probably applies to fear of flying in airliners. It doesn't matter what the statistics are, or how the causes of accidents can be divided into bad design versus bad manufacturing versus bad maintenance versus pilot error... all that matters in the person's mind is "Holy
,
this or
this might happen, and that's terrifying!!!". I think that the only way to help such people overcome their fears might be to expose them to lots and lots of uneventful flights, maybe encourage them to watch movies and TV shows where flying light airplanes is done repeatedly and safely (
Flying Wild Alaska, Bush Pilots, etc.), to keep talking about how last week you flew over here and this week you flew over there, etc. But even that might not work, because strong fears are not rational and most people do not want to invest the effort it takes to overcome them. (Just this past weekend, my mother visited me from the east coast, and yet again I failed to convince her to go up in the RV with me... Which clearly means you should take all of my opinions on this matter with a huge grain of salt!)