The Longer You Work in Aviation, The Worse Flyer You Become

Are you a nervous flyer?

There. I said it.

Thirty-six years in aviation maintenance. Test flights. Working around aircraft on high-power engine runs with nothing between me and the intake but good judgement and a healthy respect for Bernoulli's principle. Clambering over aircraft in conditions that would make most office workers call in sick.

By any reasonable measure, I have spent the better part of four decades in one of the more physically demanding and technically unforgiving working environments on the planet.

And somewhere along the way, flying started to make me nervous.

Not the industry. Not the safety record. The actual sitting-in-a-seat-at-35,000-feet part.

If you work in aviation and you're nodding right now, welcome. You are not alone, and you are not irrational. You are, in fact, paying attention.

At 18, flying was simple

Cast your mind back to your first years in the industry.

Flying was uncomplicated. The checklist was: am I getting on this flight, where are we going, and how quickly can I locate the bar upon arrival.

Turbulence was a minor inconvenience. That clunk on climb-out was obviously the gear retracting, obviously, and the slight vibration during cruise was almost certainly nothing. The engine spool-down on climb was completely normal and definitely not worth thinking about. You knew enough to know these things happened. You did not yet know enough to know all the reasons why they sometimes didn't.

Youth is a magnificent filter. It lets the important information through and quietly disposes of the rest.

Then the years accumulate

Here is what nobody tells you when you enter aviation maintenance as a bright-eyed apprentice.

Every aircraft type you learn, every maintenance manual you study, every defect you investigate, every AOG you resolve, every human factor incident you review, every service bulletin you incorporate, all of it goes in.

And none of it comes out.

After a decade, you understand what can go wrong with a specific system. After two decades, you understand what can go wrong with the interaction between systems. After three decades, you have developed an almost subconscious awareness of the hundreds of individual process elements, the hundreds of thousands of components moving simultaneously at cruise altitude, and the precise chain of events, both human and mechanical, that has to hold together perfectly for every flight to be routine.

You don't think about this consciously when you board a flight. You don't need to. It's just there, running quietly in the background like a threat assessment engine that never fully switches off, and it's exhausting.

Every bump registers differently than it did at 18. Every unusual sound has a catalogue of possible causes attached to it. The slight yaw during cruise that a normal passenger wouldn't notice, you noticed. You always notice.

The BBQ question

Anyone who has spent serious time in aviation maintenance knows the BBQ question.

You mention what you do for a living. Someone, there's always someone, puts down their drink and asks: "So how safe is flying really? Are we due for a crash in Australia?"

For most of my career my answer was instinctive and genuinely confident: not for a long time, and it would take a major, major systemic failure for it to happen here.

And, I still believe that. Australian aviation has an extraordinary safety record and the regulatory and operational frameworks that underpin it are among the best in the world.

But I pause now before I answer. Where I once responded with the easy confidence of someone who knew the systems worked, I now respond with the measured confidence of someone who also knows, intimately, what those systems are working against.

Human factors. Regulatory drift. Workforce pressure. Maintenance culture. Engineering design margins that were calculated for one operating environment and are now being tested in another.

It's not pessimism, it's pattern recognition. And in my case it has taken thirty-six years to develop.

What aviation experience actually teaches you about flying

Here is the uncomfortable truth that the industry doesn't put in the brochure.

The more you know about aviation maintenance, the more acutely aware you become that safe flight is not a guarantee delivered by hardware. It is an outcome produced by a system, and systems, however well designed, are operated by humans, maintained by humans, regulated by humans, and occasionally failed by humans.

Most passengers board an aircraft with a simple and entirely reasonable assumption: the people responsible for this aircraft know what they're doing and the aircraft is safe. That assumption is correct the overwhelming majority of the time. Aviation's safety statistics are genuinely remarkable.

But the maintenance engineer sitting three rows back isn't operating on assumption. He or she is operating on knowledge, very specific, accumulated, hard-won knowledge about exactly how thin some of those margins can be when everything doesn't go perfectly.

That's not fear. That's professional awareness wearing the wrong costume for a staff travel leisure flight.

So why do we keep flying?

Because we also know the other side of the ledger.

We know the depth of the regulatory framework. We know the competence of the people who built and maintain these aircraft. We know the layers of redundancy engineered into every critical system. We know that aviation is one of the only industries that treats near-misses as learning opportunities rather than embarrassments to be buried.

We know that the system, for all its complexity and human dependence, works at a level of reliability that no other form of transport comes close to matching.

We just board the flight with our eyes open wider than most.

Every hum, every bump, every unexplained sound gets filed, assessed, and usually dismissed, quite correctly, within about three seconds. The nervous flyer with a wine in seat 14C is catastrophising . The aviation professional in seat 14D is doing a rapid fault assessment and reaching the same conclusion: this is fine.

It just takes us slightly longer to get there than it used to.

Vigilance is not the same as worry

The next time someone at a BBQ asks me when Australia is due for an aviation accident, I'll still tell them: not soon, and not without a significant systemic failure that multiple layers of defence would have to miss simultaneously.

But I'll also tell them that the people best placed to ensure that remains true are the ones who never stop asking uncomfortable questions. The engineers who read the service bulletin twice. The planners who flag the scheduling anomaly. The LAME who pauses before signing the maintenance release because something, not in the data, not in the manual, just something, doesn't feel right.

Vigilance is not the same as anxiety, it is in fact, the opposite.

Thirty-six years in aviation hasn't made me afraid of flying.

It's made me afraid of complacency. And that, I'd argue, is exactly the right thing to be afraid of.

Fly safe,

Craig.

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Jotore Aviation Consulting provides maintenance strategy, regulatory compliance, and CAMO/AMO advisory services to Australian aviation operators.