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First, OneAnt is right on target. IF you imagine disaster once, you know you are imagining it. BUT, if you repeatedly imagine that happening, you memorize the imagination. Once imagination is memorized, since it is stored in the mind in the same manner as factual information is, when it later comes in to mind, it has the force and authority of fact. That, then, causes it it seem like - if you fly - you definitely will crash. So you are on a very unfortunate track if you continue to imagine disaster happening.

Second, there is no good reason to do so. I can't, being a pilot, imagine what an accident would be like, or what would signal an accident about to happen. Accidents are so rare in the first place, and in the second place, when there is one, measures are taken so that doesnt' happen again. So, for an accident to happen, it generally is something that never happened before, so you can begin to see how fruitless it is to try to imagine something that has never happened before, or how you would know something that has never happened before is happening.

But you, too, are right on target in a different way. (when you say: "I don't really fear death, I fear the manner of death. I have an issue with imagining drownning, plane crashes and torture.") It isn't BEING dead that is the problem, it is GETTING dead. And when you begin to think about how awful "getting" dead on a plane might be, what are you using for the basis of that? Perhaps, if Alan Schore (researcher in neurobiological psychology) suggests, it has might come from being put to bed as a young child and left in terror to cry it out. He says, according to his research, when kids put to bed to "cry it out" appear to have gone to sleep, they are not asleep, but in a state of disassociated terror. It is very interesting to me how, when people imagine "getting dead" on a plane, that they seem to know the experience so well. I believe it is based on childhood terrors, which we hope to never feel again.

Another factor is that when pregnant and approaching delivery, recent research shows the expectant mother's brain is flooded with hormones that cause an obsession with safety. Anything that remotely (it doesn't have to make sense) seems like a risk has to be avoided. That's good for protecting the new infant in a primitive way, but it doesn't really protect in a modern world where such genetic encoding dealt with dangers that persisted thousands of years ago. And, though the hormones subside after deliver, the patterns established during that time may stick. That, in part, is what you are dealing with.

In any case, I'm sure we can correct it. Take a look at www.fearofflying.com/relief/

We have a little thing in the SOAR Course called "The Thousand Moment Life". It is a story about a little animal that lives in a hole. Destiny has determined that this little animal is going to live one-thousand moments. But the little animal doesn't know. So, every day, it peeks out just a bit to see what is going on and thinks, "Is this 'IT' - is this the last moment of my life?"

And after answering that, and discovering it is still alive, it assumes it isn't the last moment of its life, and crawls back into its hole to safety.

Then, in the next moment, it repeats that.

And continues to repeat that until moment number 999.

Then, when moment one-thousand arrives, and the little creature climbs up to look around, and asks, "Is this the last moment of my life?" And discovers it is. Then it says, "Ahhhhh. At LAST I can relax." And then it dies.

The point of the story is that the focus on safety and what it might be like to die - yes, of course, in the service of being prepared and bracing yourself for it - only consumes every moment of a person's life, except one: the last one. Finally, when you realize you are about to die, you get it live.

But for only one moment - in your whole life.

It reminds me of how stock car racing got started. Guy who ran "moonshine" liquor gathered at a track in North Wilkesboro, N.C. to race each other on a dirt track. The organizer and owner of the track required a small entry fee.

Basically, the rules were, there are no rules. When a prospective driver asked about the rules, the expression was, "You pays your money and you takes your chances."

It isn't easy to recognize, much less accept, that there are no guarantees, and the rules are not always followed, and there is no absolute safety.