Fear of flying: How the LaGuardia crash has deepened anxiety for some travelers

On the morning of Jaislyn DiGiglio’s flight from Long Island MacArthur Airport to Palm Beach, Florida, this week, she prayed for safety.

The runway crash between a plane and truck at LaGuardia Airport that killed two pilots Sunday night was on DiGiglio’s mind.

"I did think about it," she said. "Those two pilots that unfortunately passed away, I was thinking about them and their families, and my family. I’m recently married. All that ran through my head."

For DiGiglio, 30, who lives in Northport and works in the yachting industry, canceling or postponing her flight was not an option; she needed to get to Florida for a yacht show. She coped by distracting herself with a book and praying "not only for myself but for every plane taking off today."

In the same Ronkonkoma airport  waiting area, Sharmine Parsaud 62, a lawyer from Seaford, said that for the first time since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, she was nervous about flying.

"The recent event at LaGuardia gave me concern," she said. "That’s an airport I generally fly out of when I go for business."

Parsaud was flying for pleasure, not work, but her trip was no less important than DiGiglio’s: Her father was turning 90.

"It’s an event," Parsaud said. "I didn’t want to miss it."

Commercial air travel has been for years and remains, by almost every empirical measure, a very, very safe mode of travel. In nearly 20 million flight hours for air carriers in the United States in 2024, the most recent year for which full data was available, the federal Bureau of Transportation Statistics recorded just 34 serious air accidents.

The lifetime odds of dying as an aircraft passenger in the United States are "too small to calculate," according to the nonprofit National Safety Council.

But in an uneasy world, statistics don’t always soothe, and for some travelers, accidents like Sunday’s — its cause and chronology still murky, its effects still evident at LaGuardia in major delays and the closure of a runway — can trigger or rekindle anxiety over flying.

"If you do have anxiety about flying, after something like this, it’s probably intensified," said George Hodyno, a retired airline pilot from Elmont who flew out of MacArthur for decades and now lives in Henderson, Nevada. "I used to stand in the jetway when passengers were boarding and there were always questions — is it going to be bumpy, are we going to be on time, what’s your [flight] experience, and if I found a passenger with a lot of anxiety, I’d take them up into the cockpit, sit them down and explain exactly what we were going to do."

Hodyno’s advice for anxious flyers: "Ask the crew. ... If there’s any anxiety about it, ask the question. We’d be happy to answer. Part of our job is passenger comfort. You want people to feel secure."

For some people, intense fear of flying causes physiological responses, including elevated pulse and blood pressure, hyperventilation, gastric distress and frequent panic attacks, according to according to a study by researchers at Charles University in Czechia.

"The baseline anxiety level is high," said Dr. Victor Fornari, director of child and adolescent psychiatry at Northwell's Zucker Hillside Hospital, who treated survivors of Avianca Flight 052 in 1990. "Given current events, there’s a heightened sense of anxiety, given the current global situation with war and concerns about safety, ... People who are already anxious may be feeling even more anxious."

Flying, like few other activities, strips away what Fornari called the illusion of control of one’s life. For many travelers, something as simple as listening to music or engaging in a little exercise can assuage anxiety. For some people with an especially intense fear of flying, doctors may prescribe short-acting anti-anxiety drugs like Xanax, Klonopin or Ativan, Fornari said.

One aviation expert suggested a nuanced response: The cause of the crash is not known now but it will be, and that knowledge will improve aviation safety, said Robert Joslin, associate professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida.

Joslin said National Transportation Safety Board investigators were likely scrutinizing communications between the truck, plane and air traffic control, clearance procedures and the equipment and technologies that should have prevented the crash.

"They’ll drill down to a million other variables and this will get scrutiny," he said. "When these things have happened in the past, there’s procedural training, with special emphasis put into simulator training for pilots and making sure they reinforce training for vehicle operators."