My wife getting scared

I've been a pilot for 12 years now. I've been married (this time) for 10.
Three years ago, the DE who passed me on my private and instrument tickets
died in a stupid accident. My wife had met him a few times at flying club
dinners and around the airport. A few weeks ago, a club member who she'd
also met several times died in his float plane, a plane that I'd flown in
a few weeks before that. He died with his best friend, a former club
member who I knew a bit but whom my wife didn't.

Now that two people she's met have died flying in a relatively short
period of time, she's getting less and less secure about my own flying.
Every time I head out to the airport, she gives me the talk. "Be careful.
Don't die. If you have the slightest doubt, come back." Etc. And so on.

I don't think she'll tell me to stop, because she knows I was a pilot
before we married. But what can I do to reassure her? The pilot
community is pretty small, and losing three people associated with our
little club is pretty scary for her.

At one time, I thought when the kids were finished college I'd finally
have enough money to buy a share in a float plane and we could have some
adventures together. Now I'm not even sure she'd come flying in a club
plane.

--
Paul Tomblin http://blog.xcski.com/
....I'm not one of those who think Bill Gates is the devil. I simply
suspect that if Microsoft ever met up with the devil, it wouldn't need an
interpreter. -- Nick Petreley

Paul Tomblin wrote:
I've been a pilot for 12 years now. I've been married (this time) for 10.
Three years ago, the DE who passed me on my private and instrument tickets
died in a stupid accident. My wife had met him a few times at flying club
dinners and around the airport. A few weeks ago, a club member who she'd
also met several times died in his float plane, a plane that I'd flown in
a few weeks before that. He died with his best friend, a former club
member who I knew a bit but whom my wife didn't.

Now that two people she's met have died flying in a relatively short
period of time, she's getting less and less secure about my own flying.
Every time I head out to the airport, she gives me the talk. "Be careful.
Don't die. If you have the slightest doubt, come back." Etc. And so on.

I don't think she'll tell me to stop, because she knows I was a pilot
before we married. But what can I do to reassure her? The pilot
community is pretty small, and losing three people associated with our
little club is pretty scary for her.

At one time, I thought when the kids were finished college I'd finally
have enough money to buy a share in a float plane and we could have some
adventures together. Now I'm not even sure she'd come flying in a club
plane.


During the fifty odd years I've been involved in professional aviation;
most of that teaching in and flying high performance airplanes I've
buried 32 of my friends and associates. My wife was with me through
forty of those years and knew many of these people personally.
I've dealt with this issue both in my own home and as an adviser to others.
I can tell you this in all sincerity and honesty.
I realize you might not be involved in high risk aviation so what I am
about to say to you might even be easier for you in your personal
situation as a pleasure pilot.
I believe I have looked at this issue from enough directions and have
enough experience with it that you might want to give serious
consideration to my advice.
When it comes to handling something like this with a loved one, you can
of course attempt to convince your wife you will be safe based on the
favorable statistics you can go dig up that say general aviation is a
safe pastime.
But my advice is to use this approach but with a caveat.
Forget using the statistics alone without additional input from you as
that road to convince a loved one is filled with pot holes.


In order to reach your wife, don't down play the dangers involved with
flying, as she is already convinced of a potential danger and has seen
what can happen when things go wrong.

The best way to handle these issues is to start immediately to convince
her that rather than denying any danger exists, you are completely aware
of the potential for danger in flying and are capable of avoiding that
danger by the way you approach the issue of flying.

In other words, what you want to accomplish here is to convince your
wife that YOU PERSONALLY are an aware pilot with a professional attitude
that is highly tuned in to the avoidance of areas of danger when you fly.
What you want to do is steer your wife into thinking of you as a pilot
separated from other pilots. You need to have her consider you
INDIVIDUALLY as competent and professional instead of viewing you as
just another pilot among many. It's the thinking about a large group
where some get hurt or killed that frightens loved ones. Once she looks
at you individually, she will realize that you PERSONALLY are aware of
danger and competent enough to stay away from it.
She will feel better knowing that.

All this having been said, there is nothing cast in stone that will
solve these kinds of issues. Accidents happen and pilots get killed once
in a while. What it boils down to is that YOU are the only one who can
address this issue with a loved one. It takes tact and it takes
understanding, but most of all it means recognizing her fears as
legitimate instead of down playing them with safety statistics.
Bring her into your world as a pilot more than you have and let her know
that above all else, you are aware....and you are a SAFE pilot.
Hope this advice has been of some help.
DH


--
Dudley Henriques

I'll echo Dudley.. and add .. let her see that you are actively staying up
to speed to remain safe
- get on the faa mailing list and attend local pilot safety meetings
- attend AOPA safety meetings.. take their on line courses
- take a weather course..
- add that next rating.. a commercial rating is the simplest to add.. a new
rating means "additional training received".
- don't wait for a sunny day and decide to go flying.. pick a day two to
three weeks out.. and then if the weather is bad or something "just is not
right"... make the decision not to go and let her know why you decided that
it was not a good day to fly.. maybe it was just because you had a "bad day"
at the office the day before.. and "your mind was not in the game"..
remember and practice IMSAFE

BT


"Paul Tomblin" wrote in message
...
I've been a pilot for 12 years now. I've been married (this time) for 10.
Three years ago, the DE who passed me on my private and instrument tickets
died in a stupid accident. My wife had met him a few times at flying club
dinners and around the airport. A few weeks ago, a club member who she'd
also met several times died in his float plane, a plane that I'd flown in
a few weeks before that. He died with his best friend, a former club
member who I knew a bit but whom my wife didn't.

Now that two people she's met have died flying in a relatively short
period of time, she's getting less and less secure about my own flying.
Every time I head out to the airport, she gives me the talk. "Be careful.
Don't die. If you have the slightest doubt, come back." Etc. And so on.

I don't think she'll tell me to stop, because she knows I was a pilot
before we married. But what can I do to reassure her? The pilot
community is pretty small, and losing three people associated with our
little club is pretty scary for her.

At one time, I thought when the kids were finished college I'd finally
have enough money to buy a share in a float plane and we could have some
adventures together. Now I'm not even sure she'd come flying in a club
plane.

--
Paul Tomblin http://blog.xcski.com/
...I'm not one of those who think Bill Gates is the devil. I simply
suspect that if Microsoft ever met up with the devil, it wouldn't need an
interpreter. -- Nick Petreley

On Sep 30, 10:36 pm, Dudley Henriques wrote:
During the fifty odd years I've been involved in professional aviation;
most of that teaching in and flying high performance airplanes I've
buried 32 of my friends and associates. My wife was with me through
forty of those years and knew many of these people personally.
I've dealt with this issue both in my own home and as an adviser to others.
I can tell you this in all sincerity and honesty.

Hi,

I'm a student pilot, and I am very curious to know what percentage of
that 32 can be attributed to pilot error.

Also, I agree.

When I get my certificate, I plan to use same discipline that I use on
my bike. I (very ocassionally) get up to 150 mph on my VFR-800, and
this freaks people out, especially my sister, who worries and asks me
if it is dangerous, and I tell the truth. But the danger is not on a
straightaway. Danger happens during momentarily lapses of self-
discipline at 30mph. On a recent 440 mile round-trip to family
gathering, on the way home, it was 3:00 A.M, with about 8 miles to go,
my legs were cramping up so bad that none of the "stick-leg-out-while"
tricks would work. I started musing about all the bad things that
could happen, because of simple leg cramps. "What if there is a
mattress in road, not able to rake because legs won't move..what if I
pass out..." Then, in an epiphanous moment, I thought, "Darwinism
might be in action, at this very moment. Pull over." I calmly pulled
my bike over to side of road, turned it off, parked it, and waited, in
total darkness, for 15 minutes until my circulation got right again.
My legs were so cramped, I could barely dismount without falling over.
I have no idea whether I would have wrecked if I had tried to hold out
those last 8 miles. But that's the point. I did not, because I made
sure. I managed my risk.

I told this story to my family and it helped them relax. Maybe you
could tell a similar story to your wife.

-Le Chaud Lapin-

Drive faster. my wife worries more about me getting killed on th eway to
the airport.


Bertie

On Oct 1, 3:58 pm, (Paul Tomblin) wrote:
I've been a pilot for 12 years now. I've been married (this time) for 10.

Stupid question, but does your wife fly with you? Do you actively
involve her in your flying, or is she completely dis-interested.

Sometimes, it's kinda like air-sickness, if your passenger is quezey,
get them on the stick for a bit - perhaps if you could get your wife
more involved, you could both enjoy it.

AIDS (Aviation Induced Divorce Syndrome) is a fairly common affliction
unfortunatly, you may need to take some preventative action sooner
rather than later.

In a previous article, Dudley Henriques said:
In other words, what you want to accomplish here is to convince your
wife that YOU PERSONALLY are an aware pilot with a professional attitude
that is highly tuned in to the avoidance of areas of danger when you fly.

The problem with that approach is that after the DE guy died, that worked
because Rochester aviation's dirty little secret was that he was a known
corner-cutter and risk taker. But when the other two died, I had to admit
that I've flown with one of them a couple of times and I couldn't fault
anything he did. He seemed to me careful and methodical and professional.


--
Paul Tomblin http://blog.xcski.com/
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.

In a previous article, James Sleeman said:
On Oct 1, 3:58 pm, (Paul Tomblin) wrote:
I've been a pilot for 12 years now. I've been married (this time) for 10.

Stupid question, but does your wife fly with you? Do you actively
involve her in your flying, or is she completely dis-interested.

She flies with me if we're going somewhere she wants to go. But 90% of
the time if I'm just going for the sake of flying, she doesn't want to go.
I used to drag her along, and she'd read a book or fall asleep.


--
Paul Tomblin http://blog.xcski.com/
"I've gone through over-stressed to physical exhaustion -- what's next?"
"Tuesday."
-- Simon Burr and Kyle Hearn

Paul Tomblin wrote:
In a previous article, Dudley Henriques said:
In other words, what you want to accomplish here is to convince your
wife that YOU PERSONALLY are an aware pilot with a professional attitude
that is highly tuned in to the avoidance of areas of danger when you fly.

The problem with that approach is that after the DE guy died, that worked
because Rochester aviation's dirty little secret was that he was a known
corner-cutter and risk taker. But when the other two died, I had to admit
that I've flown with one of them a couple of times and I couldn't fault
anything he did. He seemed to me careful and methodical and professional.



Several of the 32 I have buried were Blue Angels and Thunderbirds.
Others were air show display pilots, test pilots, and military pilots.
These people represented the top of the heap and the best of the best.
My wife knew them all, but these people were not me.
How you convince your wife you are safe will be unique to your own
personal situation and how good you are at presenting that situation to
her.
Best of luck to you.
DH

--
Dudley Henriques

She flies with me if we're going somewhere she wants to go. But 90% of
the time if I'm just going for the sake of flying, she doesn't want to go.
I used to drag her along, and she'd read a book or fall asleep.

Hey, that's the highest compliment a passenger can pay you.

(They can't sleep if they're terrified... ;-)

I have dealt with this fear from many angles. In fact, now it is ME
who is scared, when my only son goes up for a lesson, so the shoe is
truly on the other foot.

With my wife, Mary, the best thing I could have done was to get her
interested in flying. Once SHE had "the bug", there was no way she
could sit on the ground and worry -- she was right there with me.
This, of course, doesn't solve the very real problem of risk and risk
avoidance that comes with flying -- but it makes our marriage more
comfortable.

Our families have always been worried about us flying, especially when
we fly while our kids are in school. I must admit that Mary and I had
long, involved discussions over the wisdom of this practice (required
because our "weekends" are Wed/Thu, so if we want to fly it's going to
be during their school day), and it's not always been easy to
discuss.

Our "worst case scenario" is imagining what would happen to our kids
if we simply went up on a Wednesday and didn't come back. None of
our family lives in Iowa, so the kids would be on their own throughout
the ordeal that would inevitably follow an accident -- and this is
simply not something any parent would wish on their kids.

This fear has faded somewhat, now that our kids are teenagers. When
they were in elementary school, Mary was VERY uncomfortable flying
without them (for some reason it's okay WITH them, which is pretty
odd, if you analyze it too much), because of the awful prospect of
them waiting a day or two for relatives to arrive.

On the plus side, this fear has made us VERY meticulous and careful
pilots. Preflights are NEVER omitted, fuel tanks are ALWAYS filled,
gas is ALWAYS tested, maintenance is ALWAYS done. Still, we all know
that "**** happens", and we could become statistics at some point.

I always fall back on two facts that comfort me:

1. You can either live, or wait to die. It's up to you.

2. Mary and I could be killed driving on the highway any day of the
week.

Life is a terminal condition. No one is getting off of this planet
alive. It's up to each of us to make the best of our time here, and
-- in my world -- that means flying.
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"