Worrying the night before a flight - is it normal?

Although I know that I won’t fly if the weather is worse than I’m comfortable with, on a fIight day I usually wake up earlier than usual. So probably I sleep worse than usual. I noticed that I’m more tired if forcasted weather is more challenging or more unpredictable. Consciously or not it obviously has some influence.

Same thing for me!
I’m still a rookie pilot (200 hours) and cannot stay in bed after ca 6am when I have a “significant” flight (I.e navigation for more than 2hrs or unknown destination) planned.

I also feel a sort of sound stress, comparable to what I can experience before an important business meeting, or (in the past) an exam. It reaches its climax when I arrive to the airfield and once I’ve towed the aircraft out of the hangar it’s all gone and I’m 100% focused on piloting.

I wonder whether this occurs to much more experienced pilots…

I know what you mean and I sometimes find myself thinking of all Situations that might occure. Limited to VFR doesn’t make it easier I suppose.
However when I sit in the cockpit the next day I feel good and realize, that there was no need to worry about things, that might be. But hey-doesn’t that apply for other situations in life as well? :-)

I think after a while you just accept that in aviation there are so many variables that all sorts can happen, and it does. There’s always another day and unless someone is paying you to do it for s living, there’s nothing but self induced imperative to depart. Once you’re down route you just have to roll with it or you’d end up permanently stressed out. Much of my working life was on military tanker aircraft and ‘trails’ (taking a formation of fast jets somewhere overseas) were notorious – the plan always falls apart and you end up with weather diversions and broken aircraft all over the place. The brief to the wife was always ‘see you whenever’ rather than specify a date. Nowadays I don’t (plan to) tour away overnight as with a young family and work it’s just too much potential hassle. My wife has always been adamant that I never push on with a dodgy fault or in bad weather and she’d rather have a phone call saying I’ve taken a B and B somewhere for the night; which is a big comfort.

Very similar with me!
I tend to check the weather again and again and again and tend to make myself crazy about it. Even worse when I have the family or one of the kids on board. Especially with flights across the Alps I tend to be over-careful, strangely a flight across open waters (while definitely not less risky) makes me much less “nervous”. The more I fly the more relaxed I am about it, but then: how often do you cross the Alps per season? I would have to do it once a week to get completely relaxed about it …

I must say (although i hate to admit it) that the existence of the CAPS system does help. I swore to myself when I bought the Cirrus that I would never do a flight in it I would not also do in a BRS-less plane, but after two years I realized that the parachute actually always is somewhere in the back of my mind. And I know that this creates risks that I should not take.

My situation is a bit different anyway. I used to have some fear of flying when I first started and in the beginning it took a lot of training and a lot of flying to completely overcome it. It might have to do that my mother crashed in an airliner once ;-). After I did the german aerobatic rating and flew aerobatics alone for some weeks afterwards I got much more relaxed about flying. After spinning a Zlin 20 times you know that you can safely handle your Piper and that you will not let it get out of control. It also helps me with the Cirrus today, I have no problem stalling it or doing Chandelles or Lazy Eights, even if they are not really perfect anymore …

I think this is both normal and healthy (up to a point, anyway). There are several factors that make it worse for me, in decreasing order:

- flying with my family with luggage not done and weighted the night before
- deadline at destination (closing airport or customs availability), especially in combination with the factor above
- knowing we’ll be heavy (even if I never fly out of W&B, my home runway isn’t long for my plane)
- VFR flight as opposed to IFR
- having pax
- weather uncertainty (this was a lot higher on the list before the IR and the PA46, but now that stress is mostly limited to concerns about cross winds and ceilings at my non-IFR home airport)

In reaction to that “stress”, I go into what my wife and kids call “pilot mode”. It’s now a well recognised and grudgingly accepted mood, and they’ve learned to live with it, so far…

Absolutely normal for me – tossing and turning, constantly checking the clock and invariably being wide awake far too early.

I have that too. I also question a lot of the factors like the weather but my experience is also very important – the more I fly, the less the stress is. However as I have only a small number of hours (about 320) and I went through about 10 types of aircraft, single engine, multi engine, aerobatics, VFR, IR, night, I still don’t feel perfectly confident in any situation and that increases the nervousness. I remember flying very often for my aerobatics rating (2-3 times per week) and after several weeks this state was significantly reduced and I was much more relaxed. Flying now the same airplane from the same airport but just 1-2 times a month brought the same “cannot sleep” and “I wonder if everything is OK” questions back.

The same for me, specially with the flight coming up tomorrow …
Bad sleep and weather checking again and again… even there are still only the same maps online…
And sure, the older the worse….