The fear of flying affects many people throughout our world and it can be one of those things that is hard to overcome because there are so many parts to flying to be scared of! There's the claustrophobia (especially in smaller planes with a bigger person next to you), fear of crashing, nervousness about freaking out on the plane, and the fact that the woman announces what you will be doing in the event of crash which is not something you really want to be thinking about while flying.

Fortunately many of these fears can be fixed as the fears stem from things that you have heard or seen on TV. Once you understand the truth to these occurrences your fear may lesson or disappear completely - I know mine did!

One huge fear of flying is extremely popular. The fear that turbulence equals doom! This is shared by so many people who fly. The truth is planes are built to go through some turbulence. If they weren't then there would be no flying - ever. In fact, they can go through a hefty amount of turbulence without falling apart at the seams. The plane is built to fly which means it can handle the turbulence that comes its way. The best way to look at turbulence is as something that forces you to wake up and put your seatbelt on and causes some discomfort.

Air pockets have been said to force a plane to drop hundreds of feet in the air, but the truth is that won't happen. First of all it will be hard to find a place in the sky without air. I mean really, have you ever heard of such a thing? If that was the case then we would hear about it quite often in the news and experience it ourselves when we accidently walked into a pocket that had no air!

And thanks to many movies and TV shows there is a myth that you can fall straight down if the engines on the plane gives out. But this simply won't happen. A plane is meant to glide like a bird.  Birds do not go straight down if they stop flapping! They glide.

If your engines go out then you will glide out of cruise altitude and make your decent somewhat like a gliding bird. You won't just drop from the sky. And many pilots do land planes without the engines on when they are trying to save fuel. So you can be assured that pilots know what they are doing and how to land safely if they have to.

Those are just a few of the common fears of flying that come from the TV or just gossip in general, but now you know that they really are not to be feared but to be viewed as 'things planes can do'. The more you learn about planes and how they operate the less afraid you will be.