Pilot tells us why you shouldn't be afraid of flying

Captain Stephen Allwright is joining me in studio now. He's going to be introducing us to his book Flying with Confidence. Hello. Hello, good morning. How are you? Very well, thank you. Good. Now, how long have you been flying with confidence for? 24 years, 12,000 flying hours, all with British Airways. I'm now a 4-7 captain. Wow, that's impressive. Now, what brought about Flying with Confidence? Why don't you tell us what we can expect from the book and then we'll talk about how it came to be? Yeah, sure. So, 28 years ago, two captains realised that there was a need that some people actually don't like flying, that they're nervous, that some people never fly or just become anxious before a flight. In fact, surveys show around one in four people have some kind of anxieties around flying. One in ten have significant difficulties. So, these two guys started a course to help people understand about flying, understand how, you know, 400 tonnes of metal and people get airborne and stay airborne, all the safety and regulations around it that make it so safe. Have you ever been afraid while flying? No, never. Never? No, no. We're highly trained professionals. It's something that we talk about on the course. We explain to people how well pilots are selected, trained and tested on a very regular basis. They're probably the most regulated profession on the planet. Every six months we go in a simulator and are retrained and tested. What's the reaction you get from people when you explain all of this to them? Yeah, they love it. You know, knowledge is power, isn't it? And nothing in life is to be feared, said Madame Curie. It is only to be understood. And so, you know, all the little, you know, ding dong, you know, that's not imminent disaster. That's Jane calling Sarah on the interphone. They've run out of orange juice down the back, little things like that. The wing getting bigger, you know, makes a funny noise. Well, we need the wing bigger for takeoff and landing because we fly more slowly for takeoff and landing. And so they understand, all right, that's why those things move out the front and back of the wing, the flaps and slats. Explain all those things. So you have a prop here. Can you explain what each thing does for us? Well, you know, it'd take me an hour to do. So these are the wings. This is the most important thing, OK? The wings produce lift. It's the wings that enable the aircraft to fly, not the engines. This aeroplane can glide for 100 miles without any engines whatsoever. Really? Yeah, it glides. They're fantastic gliders, aircraft. They're highly designed. And then at the back here, we've got lots of control surfaces. So we have the fin, the rudder, stabilizer and the elevators here. Ailerons at the edge of the wing for banking. This is how we turn. And we explain to people, we don't turn like this, even though it looks like that when you're looking out the window. It's a maximum of 30 degrees of bank. Really? That's a maximum. We normally would use sort of 20, 25. Do you find that once people understand, the fear falls away or is that fear always there a little bit? It's there a little bit. So we don't expect people to be cured in one day. It's a one day course that we run. But what we do is we teach people some techniques to break into the phobia, some breathing techniques and muscle clenching techniques. And that helps to control the adrenaline release that is associated with any phobia. You're running a course on Saturday in Johannesburg. Where and when and how? Okay, so it's in Sandton. And you can go on the website www.flyingwithconfidence.com. If you can't remember that, just go on BA.com. There's a nice link on there in the health and wellbeing section. And you can book on the course. We've got a few places left, so we'd love to see you along. Great. Now, if people can't make it out to the course, they can always get the book and take themselves through it. Where can they get the book? The book's available in any good bookshop or via on the internet, Amazon, Stockit. So that's very easy to just order on there. Good. Thank you for coming in. Thank you very much indeed. Thanks.