Maybe wrong board but here goes...I cannot stand to fly, I don't

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even like being in an airport and I know this fear to be most irrational...I would like to fly for the ease it provides...has anyone tried hypnosis and if so was it beneficial...

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Book an international flight. Take off and land about 5 to 9 times in a two week period.

You will be over your fear. Worked for me.

Have flown about 6 times and gets worse each time...have never had a bad moment flying...as a child a plane/jet crashed into a hotel on the Airline Highway as it approached MSY and that has never left me

I fly 4 times a week, every week.

You have nothing to be scared of. Take a walk on the wild side, leave your phone on and listen to some music during take off and landing.

You'll be fine.

I agree with what people are saying about flying more, unless you absolutely cannot stomach getting onto a plane. Then you may need to see a psychiatrist. It's like any phobia -the more you face it, the less it scares you.

Lots of people go to the doctor before, tell them the problem, and get a prescription to valuums or similar. Would help you relax.

Also... One thing to be aware of when you fly, is uncomfortable shite happens fairly often on planes. There is often turbulence, delayed flights/landings, bad weather, emergency landings, but commercial planes hardly EVER crash these days in the US. So if you do fly, and something uncomfortable happens, just relax.. They'll take care of ya!

Talk to your doctor and try and get a prescription Xanax for the flight. A few people I know have big fears of flying and that's what they do. Works for them.

My daughter was very fearful of flying because she is just a scared, paranoid type person. She got valium or xanax for our flight to Hawaii. She was knocked out and drooling for most of the flight. Worked great!

Fast forward a few months and she had to take her dance team (she is a high school teacher) to Disney for competition. She couldn't be knocked out and drooling for this flight and she did fine. Now she flies with no trepidation.

Good luck to you!

Edited to add:
Flew with my sister twice in the last year and she just about had a fit the first time we hit turbulence. I told her to think of turbulence as hitting a pothole in the sky. It calmed her down!

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as a child a plane/jet crashed into a hotel on the Airline Highway as it approached MSY and that has never left me

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You just need to realize that plane crashes always make the news and stay in your head because they are incredibly rare.

This Wikipedia article has a good example of how safe flying is. It uses an example of a 450 mile trip, which is right around the threshold where flying is faster (after accounting for driving to/from airports, checking in, etc).

What it boils down to is that driving the whole way is about 8 times more dangerous (6.8 out of a million likelihood of dying driving, vs. 0.8 out of a million by flying). As someone already mentioned, the funny part is that out of that 0.8/million chance of dying by taking a flight, 0.6 of it is attributed to driving a total of 40 miles to and from the airports, and the remaining 0.2 goes for the actual flight of over 400 miles.

If you exclude the driving from the flight statistics, then mile for mile flying is about 30 times safer.

I'm assuming you already knew this, or at least had an idea, because you said you know the fear you have is irrational. I can't recommend any drugs (because I wouldn't want to be dependent on them), and I can't recommend hypnosis (because I have never tried it and don't believe I could be hypnotized), but I want you to ask yourself a question: would you really feel safer making your trip on the roads with thousands of people, from the 16 year old texting on her phone, to the old man who can barely see the road, and almost all of them are thinking about something other than driving?

Personally, I'm relieved when I sit on a plane knowing that my pilot and copilot continually pass very strict tests and physicals, and especially so when I look around the plane and see 100+ people going to the same place that I am, and I'm thankful that I am not on the road next to them.

I'm like this as well. I've done a discovery flight in two seater, single prop plane with no issue and actually enjoyed it, but when AA flew me through and around a tropical storm in their shite-can MD-80 coming home from vacation in the Caribbean, I was on the verge of a panic attack. I also hate seeing other planes when we're in the air. My fear comes and goes depending on the flight, but I definitely don't enjoy flying like I did when I was younger.

Never tried hypnosis, but flying can cause rather extreme anxiety (in myself included, I particularly remember one time seeing how far below me a particular cloud was and, no matter how interesting the conversation I was having was, I could not unfocus from how high I was off the ground). Anxiety for flying, in and of itself, is actually justification for the prescription of an anxiolytic.

Personally, I just spend a bit of time and money at the airport bar first.