Talk:Fear of flying

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I manually moved the stuff over from aviophobia to here because fear of flying already had a history. I pointed out that aviophobia is 1)not plain English, 2)two syllables longer than fear of flying, 3)a terribly constructed, illegitimate Greek-Latin hybrid, 4)a word that (ignoring the poor construction) means "Fear of Birds". Aviophobia simply isn't a legitimate word--it's not even in the OED.Mauvila 08:52, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I changed the wording "an irrational" to "a " as stating that somethins is irrational implies a point of view.

The orignal wording was "Fear of flying is an irrational fear of air travel." Changed the sentence to read "Fear of flying is a fear of air travel." Who is to say that it's an irrational fear? Air travel was not as safe as it is today for most of the people who might have traveled on the provided list. Wjbean 23:39, 2005 Apr 25 (UTC)

Well, I suppose you're right. But we then should probably replace 'air travel' with the more common term 'flying'. And we would be left with 'Fear of flying is a fear of flying.' A beautifully reflexive statement. I'm pretty sure the reason it said 'irrational' was that the article was originally under some bizarrely constructed 'phobia' word. And phobias generally are defined as irrational. But those phobias tend to be stuff like 'fear of the letter 13', 'fear of water', and things that could legitimately be classified as irrational. But I see nothing worthy of the DSM-IV in flying. Imagine something being defined as the "irrational fear of skydiving". 68.63.58.122 08:24, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Request for Help: Commercial external links

Hi. This article page seems to be attract commercial links somewhat. I'm having a hard time telling if the remaining two links are of real value to people with a fear of flying. Can somebody help? --Netizen 10:44, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

Anybody? I'm not knowledgable about this topic. --Netizen 08:09, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

I find the first (free) course very useful. Marie Tessier 23:19, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Inconsequential Statistics

I think the following should be removed from the first paragraph:

"this despite that driving in an automobile is statistically many times more dangerous."

The person who wrote this failed to note that there are many more automobiles on the road than there are planes in the sky, which may certainly bump up those "statistics".

Cparker 05:05, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

I agree. I'm getting awfully tired of seeing this statistic without a source to back it up. There are many ways in which you could compare the two statistics. My opinion is that you'd have to compare 'fatal car crashes due to the actions of another driver' since not much else really works out well (i.e., direct fatalities caused by negligent drivers, EXCLUDING the driver that caused the accident). Any moron can get a driver's license in the U.S., whereas flying a commercial airliner takes many years of training and many, many, many flight hours.

Although commercial flight is very safe by any standard, I think it's entirely possible that this statistic is yet another silly statistic without real footing or relevance.
—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 67.50.83.206 (talk • contribs) 10:05, 5 April 2006. (See diff)

I have added a reference to a USDOT page that has statistics for motor vehicle and air travel fatalities, among other things. They measure it in deaths per miles traveled, which is what you want if you're comparing driving vs. flying for the same trip. Nate 17:04, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

What about General Aviation as opposed to Commercial Aviation? Does anybody have relevant statistics? Piotr

Agree. I think this subject deserves its own discussion section within the article. (Or maybe a new article on the safety of flying, to which a link could be added here.) There's no one "right" way to look at "the statistic." Perhaps several (possibly conflicting) references should be included with a discussion of the caveats of each... let the reader draw a conclusion about whether flying really is "safer" based on whatever metric they feel comfortable with (deaths over the whole population? deaths per aircraft mile? deaths per passenger mile?). David Norris 22:21, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] List of people

I am going to clean this list from persons whose artciles do not mention fear of flying or the list entry itself does not give a reference, according to wikipedia:Verifiability rule. Such a bare list is an invitation to hoahers. `'mikka (t) 23:41, 5 June 2006 (UTC)