The author of this Slate.com article, Inigo Thomas, is. How does he deal with it? By trying to become as educated as possible about airplanes and how plane crashes happen. He recommends several books to any compatriots who want to join in the same quest. Unfortunately, though, it doesn't seem to have worked for him:
For a long time I didn't like flying; for years, I loathed it, and equal to that dislike was the loathing for pills that would have made the fear less hard felt. The worst thing about the fear was that the more I got to know about flying, and the more I flew, the more unmanageable the fear became.. . .
The problem with statistical improbability of being on a plane that crashes—from the point of view of someone unable to find what could be described as safety in numbers—isn't the millionth part of the equation but with the one. One is a small number, but the one in a million or 10 million nevertheless remains one. So, even as Why Airplanes Crash became essential preflight reading, it didn't resolve the problem I had with flying. I read and reread Jonathan Harr's classic New Yorker piece about a plane crash near Pittsburgh in the early 1990s—as forensic a piece about an aviation accident that anyone who doesn't like flying could expect to read. I read and reread an article by William Langewiesche in the Atlantic Monthly about how planes bank—Langewiesche the son of a famous aviator and author, whose riveting Rudder and Stick has been in print since its publication in 1944.
. . .
Despite the reading, my fear of flying remained. Flying has become a routine, but planes obviously still crash.
Maybe, I should just settle for the pharmaceutical solution instead.
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