Frode Berg wrote:

However, during the past 3 years or so, I've constantly been
overly alert towards the possibility of hitting something in the sky.

There's no such thing as being "overly" alert. The alerter, the better
:-). Sans drugs, of course :-).

Now, I'm constantly looking for traffic, instead of relaxing,
calmly doing the checklists etc.

Looking for traffic should be part of your normal scan - in VFR flight,
95% of your attention should be outside the cockpit anyway. Nothing
wrong with that.

Anyone else had "mid-air-ities" and how did you deal with it?

My wife does - she spends 80% of the time in the plane with me worrying
about hitting the 747 she can see 25 miles away, at 25K ft. I've gotten
her to worry a lot less, but she really doesn't like flying over the LA
basin. If a plane passes by 1 mile away, 500 ft. above us, she's very
concerned. As a long-time glider pilot, used to flying with 4 other 60
ft. wingspan gliders in a 300 ft. diameter thermal, I don't worry about
it much, especially if I can see them.

We used to fly in the Boston/NY corridor all the time - we'd rarely get
within 1-2 miles of anyone. Just the familiarity, and seeing that you
DON'T have near hits on a regular basis helped her.

I mean, what are the probabilities of hitting someone?

Very small. Read the Nall Report at:

http://www.aopa.org/asf/publications/nall.html

Midair collisions are a minuscule percentage of total fatal accidents,
and almost all of them happen in the pattern. There were 6 fatal
midairs in 2005, out of 290 fatal accidents. That's 2% of the total
fatals. There were 10 total midairs, out of 1413 total accidents -
that's 0.7% of all accidents.

Showing these statistics to my wife helped her become less nervous about
midairs.

Worry about CFIT or running out of gas, or some of the other stuff that
the Nall Report points out as being far more likely to bite you (most of
which are judgement errors).

--
Marc J. Zeitlin
http://www.cozybuilders.org/
Copyright (c) 2006