Devil’s Advocate Series: Are Air Crash Investigation videos breeding a new crop of fearful flyers?
- Prashant Kavi (PK)
- Dec 30, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: Jan 2
Onboard a short-haul flight recently, I exchanged small talk with a fellow passenger in the neighboring seat. This gent, upon learning my aviation background got talking animatedly about his love for aviation despite his own unrelated professional grounding in the financial services sector.
While eager to understand the inside goings-on within our industry and wanting to validate some of his assumptions about commercial aviation, in a moment of innocent candor, he also admitted that while he loved to fly, yet somehow that enthusiasm had begun to somewhat dissipate and instead, he had become an anxious flyer. This he claimed had built up gradually over time, after he started watching Air Crash Investigation videos! Explaining further, he added that the near forensic analysis of air crashes and the unearthing of root-cause factors, which were extremely minor and appeared insignificant to begin with, yet led to a catastrophe, had him dread flying now.
With his mind constantly churning those thoughts and thinking how the smallest of things could go wrong, every time he boarded a flight, he remorsefully added that flying was beginning to lose its charm for him. And given that his work demanded frequent travel, there was no escape for him either.
So, while trying in my own way to assuage my seatmate’s fears at the time, this had me thinking afterwards on how this could be potentially affecting hundreds of others in a similar vein!
Cineflix Canada, has been producing the popular Air Crash Investigation series as a documentary/docudrama since 2003, which are titled and screened as 'Air Crash Investigation' on the National Geographic channel and as 'MAYDAY: Air Disaster' or 'Air Disasters' on other channels.
Eminent journalist and contributing editor at Popular Mechanics - Jeff Wise, wrote a gripping blow-by-blow account of the crash of Air France flight AF447, in a piece for Popular Mechanics, titled: What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447. This account of the crash of AF447, an A330, is frankly quite scary in that it drives home the point about how a 'perfectly good plane was crashed into the ocean' by an air crew that was unaccustomed and therefore inadequately trained to handle a high altitude stall! While not a video format, yet the account put together by piecing Flight Data and Cockpit Voice Recorder transcripts is chilling, as it chronologically lays bare the flight deck conversations verbatim and captures the chaos in the cockpit right up to the end.
While Air Crash Investigation videos have been around for some time now, yet with advances in animation and CGI technologies, the newer lot of videos have become enormously realistic and granular in their description of air crash accidents. Add to it, a plethora of experts and their own qualitative assessment and commentary on the events and you have a surefire recipe of generating Dystychiphobia (dis-TITCH-a-phobia)!
Dystychiphobia for the uninitiated:
According to the Cleveland Clinic: “Dystychiphobia is a fear of accidents. With this specific phobia, you may feel anxious when you think about or see a place where you fear an accident may happen. Someone with dystychiphobia has extreme anxiety at the thought of being in an accident. They stay away from situations where one might happen, even if an accident is unlikely. This condition may affect their ability to go about their normal life.”
Air crash investigations are vital to provide remedial, course-correction actions for the aviation industry by assimilating learnings from every accident, to improve safety. Yet the visual representation (or otherwise) and granular analysis of these accidents is also leading to a vicarious trauma syndrome and breeding Dystychiphobia in some flyers, resulting in an aversion to flying.
While the jury is out on this, but are you also becoming an anxious flyer after watching air crash investigation videos?
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