Anxiety over air travel rises after recent plane crashes in Toronto, U.S.: psychologist

CTV News Edmonton's Nahreman Issa has more on how airline passengers are feeling after a string of recent aviation incidents.

As a major airplane crash in Toronto on Monday marked the fourth such occurrence in North America over the past three weeks, a local psychologist says he’s hearing about more anxiety from his patients over air travel.

Bryan Halabi, a registered psychologist with Edmonton’s Wholesome Psychology, says clients of his have suddenly started bringing up air travel as an issue.

“I have clients I’ve been seeing for two, three, four years (for whom) flying was never an issue; it was never something that came up,” Halabi told CTV News Edmonton on Tuesday.

“Now, in these last couple months -- especially the last few weeks -- all of a sudden, that’s a big topic of conversation. It might be just a little comment that ends up turning into an entire session because, yes, there’s actually a lot underneath that.”

A Delta Air Lines plane heading from Minneapolis to Toronto crashed and flipped on the tarmac at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport on Monday afternoon, injuring 21 passengers.

The crash was the fourth major aviation accident in North America in the past three weeks.

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A commercial jetliner and an Army helicopter collided near Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 29, killing 67 people. A medical transportation plane crashed in Philadelphia on Jan. 31, killing the six people on board and another person on the ground. And on Feb. 6, 10 people were killed in a plane crash in Alaska.

The Feb. 6 plane crash in Washington was the deadliest in the U.S. since Nov. 12, 2001, when a jet slammed into a New York City neighbourhood just after takeoff, killing all 260 people on board and five on the ground.

The last major fatal crash involving a U.S. commercial airline occurred in 2009 near Buffalo, N.Y. Everyone aboard the Bombardier DHC-8 propeller plane was killed, along with one person on the ground, bringing the death toll to 50.

The last major crash at Pearson was on Aug. 2, 2005, when an Airbus A340 landing from Paris skidded off the runway and burst into flames amid stormy weather. All 309 passengers and crew aboard Air France Flight 358 survived the crash.

Halabi said mounting anxiety over flying can start with one aspect of it, such as flight delays, and expand to include others.

“It might start with one specific thing and then become a lot bigger, and we might start worrying about different things,” he said.

“I’ve had clients tell me when they hear there’s a delay, their automatic thought is, ‘Maybe there’s something wrong with the plane,’ so something that before would have never been a thought.

“Now, all of a sudden, it is, so it is more than just the crashes themselves. It’s flying in its entirety that now brings up a lot more anxiety.”

Steps Halabi recommends his clients practise to reduce anxiety over several fears include starting with grounding techniques such as mindfulness and relaxation, “so they can gather themselves, focus more on the present and try to get their head out of worrying too much about the future.”

He then moves on with them to other treatment options, including Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, in which they examine negative thoughts together.

“For example, they may have anxious thoughts about flying. They may think that flying is not safe, or flying is dangerous or they’re going to get into a crash,” Halabi said.

“We’ll try to challenge these thoughts, try to replace them with more balanced or positive thoughts, so that we hope the anxiety which usually results from the thoughts comes down.”

American experts often highlight that U.S. plane travel is overwhelmingly safe.

The National Safety Council estimates that Americans have a 1-in-93 chance of dying in a motor vehicle crash, while deaths on airplanes are too rare to calculate the odds. Figures from the Department of Transportation tell a similar story.

With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Nahreman Issa, The Canadian Press and The Associated Press