Hi Carimi,

Lots of people are afraid of flying, although here on FT you won't find very many of them. It might help if we knew a little bit about the source of your fear. You mentioned a drunk pilot.. are you afraid of someone doing something wrong, of there being a mechanical failure, of the heights or speed?

Although I know fear isn't rational, statistically flying is absolutely safe. All of us are extremely bad at accurately gauging risk, with a tendency to disproportionately fear (and attempt to mitigate) rare large scale events over real fears that we are familiar with. Plane crashes are a good example of this: Many people, including yourself, fear being on the plane that crashes, but at the same time I bet you don't have the same fear about driving. However, unfortunately in the United States over 120 people die everyday in traffic due to collisions. We don't hear about all of the deaths in a single report and we drive so frequently that we naturally discount the risk, but imagine if the same number of people died in plane crashes every week: That would require two fully loaded 747s to crash every week.

My point isn't to scare you about driving, but rather to show how safe planes really are. The risk of being in an accident on a plane is extremely low and far lower than things you do every day. You will be flying on well maintained planes, which are subject to strict oversights (the EU will not allow planes with spotty maintenance records to fly there and the FAA isn't too lenient on that either), and flown by experienced pilots who have a full suite of computer equipment to aid them. The doors on the plane literally cannot open in flight (they are designed so that when they are closed, the pressurized cabin actually presses the door closed such that no person, or persons, could physically open it, even if they disengaged all the locks). There is virtually no threat from terrorists. For a long-haul flight, there is more than just the captain in the cockpit who can fly the plane. The plane you'll be in was also likely built right by me, here in Seattle, and has been engineered to withstand anything they would encounter in nature. You can watch them test the 777 wing here.

The point is you are objectively safe on a plane. As safe as you can be while also traveling any distance. I would encourage you to think about what exactly is causing you to feel unsafe and start thinking about your fear from there.