On a hot Saturday evening in May, I reported to Terminal 4 of Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport. There, in a small conference room behind an unmarked door, I put on a name tag and joined 18 other nervous-looking people hoping to be cured by Captain Ron.
Captain Ron (real name Ron Nielsen) is a 78-year-old former commercial pilot who teaches a free class for nervous fliers roughly once a month. He has the wholesome look of a small-town minister: rectangular glasses, short-cropped white hair, and a whimsical tuft sticking out of each nostril. He’s like the aviation equivalent of Rick Steves—the kind of guy who, after a class that goes particularly well, exclaims, “It should be against the law to have that much fun!”
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A fear of flying, Captain Ron explained, is nothing to be ashamed of. “You’re not broken.” The anxiety looks different for different people. Some worry mostly about external factors, such as crashes and terrorism. Others dread a panic attack—and how fellow passengers might react to it.
Sitting next to me was a retiree named Mike who had been coming to Captain Ron’s class regularly to address his claustrophobia ahead of a long-anticipated flight: a two-hour trip to Reno to visit his grandson. Across the table, Stephanie and her husband, whom she’d brought along for moral support, were planning a trip to Cambodia. “Over water,” someone across the room offered. Stephanie’s eyes were wide. We understood completely.
Lots of people suffer from a fear of flying, including at least 25 million of us in the United States, according to the Cleveland Clinic. Our worries are often dismissed as irrational—planes are much safer than cars, etc. But a recent succession of terrifying airplane incidents has only seemed to validate our phobia—most notably, the crash landing of the Air India Dreamliner that killed 241 people on board in early June, which came just a few months after the midair collision that killed 67 people near my home airport, just outside Washington, D.C.
Recent events notwithstanding, most aviation fears boil down to a lack of control, Elaine Iljon Foreman, a clinical psychologist and co-author of Fly Away Fear, told me. Sometimes these fears are triggered or exacerbated by a specific flying experience, or major life changes. Alex, a 42-year-old IT manager who sat near me in class, said that he developed his fear of flying when his wife was pregnant with their twins. The couple were forced to fly twice from Phoenix to Los Angeles for medical care to save the pregnancy, and for Alex, it was a traumatic experience.
I’d experienced 21 years of unmemorable flights before my own fear of flying took hold. In May 2015, I was traveling from my home state of Iowa to New York City for a summer internship. I was already nervous about moving, and then, somewhere above Illinois, the plane hit a patch of turbulence and dropped what felt like a thousand feet. Several people screamed. For the first time in my life, I began to experience what I would later understand to be panic: My face and neck went clammy, and black spots filled my vision. At one point, an overhead bin popped open and a few unbuckled passengers smacked their head on the ceiling. They were all okay, and, physically, so was I. But I had unlocked a new fear.
I’ve been a white-knuckle flier ever since. Upon boarding, I proceed down the aisle like a bride heading to a doomed marriage, quietly assessing my fellow passengers for trustworthiness, should a crash require us to forge a Lost-style alliance of survivors. At the first bump, my palms start to sweat and my calf muscles tighten. In particularly rough air, when the pilot urges the flight attendants to please take their seats, I begin to administer my own last rites—You’ve had a good run, my brain whispers—and fire off a few farewell notes to loved ones: “Really bad up here,” I text my boyfriend. “Love you.” Once, on my way to a friend’s wedding, I was so overcome with anxiety that I passed out at the gate, my body folding over my suitcase like a wilted flower.
For a while, I considered a flightless future. But the cost was too high. I remembered Royce White, the Iowa State basketball player whose fear of flying required him to drive hundreds of miles to away games, and contributed to the end of his NBA career. I thought of a longtime family friend named Betty whose aerophobia I had always interpreted as an abiding love for trains. Betty regularly traveled between Iowa and Florida via Amtrak sleeper car, a journey that took 96 hours, required layovers in Chicago and D.C., and cost approximately $4,000.
I’ve kept flying, but many of the others in Captain Ron’s class hadn’t. Alex had flown only once since his wife gave birth (the twins are in grade school now). Mike, the claustrophobic retiree, told me that on a recent attempt to fly, he took an Ambien and drank a few shots of whiskey, yet he remained too terrified to board. Tired and tipsy, he had to call his daughter for a ride home.
The main portion of Captain Ron’s class took place on a stationary Southwest airplane. After introductions, he handed out boarding passes bearing our names but no destination, and together we marched warily from the ticketing area through security. At gate D-13, a Southwest agent led us down the jet bridge and onto a waiting Boeing 737 Max 8 and, once we were seated, made a formal boarding announcement: “Good evening and welcome aboard Southwest Airlines Flight 1234, with service to nowhere!”
For the next hour, Captain Ron stood in the aisle and delivered a lecture that flitted between airplane trivia and personal anecdotes. We learned how much time is generally required for a plane to become airborne (35 to 45 seconds) and how much fuel planes typically carry for domestic flights (more than enough to get to their destination). We were reminded that turbulence, while unpleasant, is not dangerous. We learned about strategies for overpowering our emotional “elephant brain” with our logical “rider brain.” If we needed an “actionable task” to distract ourselves during takeoff, Captain Ron suggested journaling about our anxiety or quizzing a travel companion with rapid-fire math problems. Together, we inhaled for four seconds and exhaled for six. Sometimes, we learned, it helps to breathe through a straw.
Very little seemed to crack Captain Ron’s cheery exterior, including questions about the recent air-travel incidents. Newark airport had just experienced a brief radar blackout, and on the same day our class was held, the aviation hub was having air-traffic-control staffing issues. A student asked Captain Ron whether people should be worried. “Great one, great one,” he said. Airports, he explained, reduce the number of planes in the air if there aren’t enough controllers to keep people flying safely. (A few days after our class, NBC News reported that, according to an anonymous Newark air-traffic controller, the airport had lost radio contact with pilots multiple times in recent months. “I can’t tell you that that’s a desirable situation,” Captain Ron told me by phone. But pilots “have procedures” for this.)
After an hour together on the plane, we disembarked and took a group photo at the entrance to the jet bridge. A few of my classmates would be back in a month, to commune again with other anxious fliers and spend another hour on a plane hearing Captain Ron’s soothing words. For some, just sitting on that grounded plane is a form of exposure therapy. I wished I could join them.
Matteo Giuseppe Pani
The irony was not lost on me that attending my fear-of-flying class required taking two long plane rides. But the next morning I was feeling confident, and decided to forgo my usual Xanax before the flight home. Captain Ron had advised me to try boarding early, to meet the pilots, something I had assumed only a child could do.
In the cockpit, I told the captain and first officer that I hated turbulence. “That’s what everybody seems to be afraid of,” the captain said, laughing. “It’s never caused a problem.” I smiled politely. The first officer explained that he often falls asleep when he flies as a passenger—“and I wake up when we touch down!” Very helpful.
At my seat, I focused on Captain Ron’s actionable tasks. I timed our takeoff, which took exactly 40 seconds. I journaled my feelings, and listened to an audio recording created by Captain Ron called “Harmonizer,” a 32-minute cacophony of sounds and hypnotic phrases meant to desensitize and distract your brain. (“No more fears, no more suffering,” Captain Ron says on the recording. “I’ve had it, and now I’m changing. Today’s the day!”) For a more absorbing diversion, I watched a few episodes of a smutty Netflix drama about British prep schoolers.
Halfway through the flight, the plane hit a rough patch, and my skin grew clammy. What if I had distracted the pilots from their preflight checklist? Soon there was a new bout of bumps, this time bigger. My chest tightened, and I tried to breathe in for four seconds and out for six.
I thought of one of my classmates, Irene, who told me she practices accepting her lack of control by reminding herself that the universe does “what it’s going to do.” I tried to achieve a similar state of acceptance. After a few minutes, my heartbeat slowed.
The flight turned out to be one of my bumpiest, and therefore most unpleasant, in recent memory. Captain Ron had not fixed me. But I was a slightly different flier. I had learned some new tools for managing my fear. And I’d come to view that fear as something other than a shameful secret. Yes, I’d been anxious. But I had flown to Arizona. I’d eaten carne asada, hiked the Big Butte Loop, and laughed at the name “Big Butte Loop.” I had faced my discomfort—and boarded the plane anyway.
A few days after I returned to D.C., my classmate Alex was set to fly to Chicago with his family—his first airplane trip in years. I texted him the night before to say that I was thinking of him. When I didn’t hear back, I worried that his fear had once again gotten in the way. Then, late the following afternoon, I received a text. It was a picture of distant red-sandstone hills—Phoenix’s Papago Park—from a tiny airplane window.
This article appears in the September 2025 print edition with the headline “Captain Ron’s Guide to Fearless Flying.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
