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Problems in Relationships with Authority Figures: It would be an understatement to say that many fearful flyers are looking at more than the airplane when they feel fear and foreboding. "Who built that thing?"; "Who maintains it?"; Is the airline more interested in their bottom line than my well-being?"; "Is the Captain having a good day?"; "Do any of the flight crew really care about me?" — are but a few of the questions asked that reflect the potential for deep distrust of passengers for flight crews. It doesn’t stop there. For instance, the ‘minimum equipment list’, an nice convenience for most airlines and mechanics, is a source of great anxiety to many flight crew personnel – especially flight attendants who do not care for those pink placards all over the flight deck. Captains and first officers don’t like them either because they often feel that airline administrators are more committed to their stockholders than the maintenance of the company’s aircraft. We might say that situations requiring the response of "trust" are among the most anxiety provoking in the flight environment.
The fearful flyer takes the issue of trust to new heights. Individuals with this source of anxiety have experienced harm at the hands of other authorities in their lives. Residual psychic effects of this harm include a great deal of fear and anxiety that has generalized to all authorities in daily life. To adapt, most fearful flyers have developed character defenses which include an exaggerated sense of independence, suspicious avoidance of authorities, an angry "don’t mess with me" social posture, or hyper-religious idealizations which turns all trust to God and leaves nothing for human kind. Flight crews, mechanics and other airline personnel are perfect targets for these reactions of distrust because of the similarity of the dependency situation in the flight environment (passenger lives are in the "hands" of the flight crew) and the environment of childhood, where most of the damage is originally done. It is quite common for fearful flyers to feel that flight crews are, in effect, telling them to "sit down, shut up and behave yourself until the airplane lands at your destination!"
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