I feel stress the morning of the flight until the moment I taxi out for departure. No problem with sleeping the night before. The stress is usually related to the fact I’m throwing out my planned route because of marginal weather and going to different places than I was expecting. I like paper back up and almost nothing I ever print at home the week before the flight ever gets used.
I am happy to see that I’m not alone having the same feelings the night before =)
I have learned to cope with the weather factor by not caring much about the flight. It is simple for me now: If I drive to the airport in the morning and the weather forecast gives me a bad gut-feeling, then i simply cancel, even if it is perfect VFR.
However, there are other factors that I still find disturbing. One of them is bureaucracy. I seem to be allergic to bureaucracy. Thankfully, I do most of my flying in Sweden, where we don’t need to file a flight plan or anything in order to perform a flight within the national borders. Even most of the airports don’t require PPR, and for the ones that do, a simple phone call a couple of hours before the flight solves the problem. Of course I still do all of my W&B and Fuel calculations, but SkyDemon with a correct aircraft profile installed can be of great help with that.
One of my life long dreams was to fly in my home country, Greece. In 2016 (pre-Fraport era) I did that by becoming a member at the Thessaloniki Aeroclub (LGTS) and flew their C172 a couple of times. Imagine now, that in this pre-Fraport era, there was still a lot of paperwork involved. Flight plan that needs to be submitted by Fax (Jesus Christ…), general declaration form, form 720 (or something…), some statistical form for the airport, and 3 copies of all of that by hand.
Then you have to get there and fly. First problems arise when you need to enter the aeroclub area, since the security guards have never seen you before, so you get delayed there. Then the mechanics that were supposed to be open the aeroclub are late, so you get delayed there. Then you stress over sending the Fax and filling all the forms while you have to look calm in front of your passengers. Then you get to the airport security and they don’t let you through because…. you don’t wear epaulettes (OMG), so you delay there too. Then you have to pay the surprise passenger fee to the airport Police that nobody told you about. In the end you sit in the airplane more than 1 hour late due to unforeseen circumstances even though you were at the airport 3 hours before your flight. However, if the controller that was working in the TWR that day ever reads this, you were of great help! Didn’t give me any shit for delaying EOBT more than 1 hour and was very helpful throughout the flight.
Now guys imagine, all of this was pre-Fraport and handling was not mandatory for the aircraft of the aeroclub. Now add on top of all of that mandatory handling, insane landing/PPR/parking/other crap fees, slot times, AND the fact that you have to start requesting stuff 1 week in advance!
Considering all of that, that would destroy your sleep for more than one night.
Needless to say, I’m really sad but I will never again fly in Greece privately, unless I ever get so rich that I can hire a person to take care of all of this bureaucracy for me all the time.
I am really thankful to be able to fly in Sweden with minimal bureaucracy involved and I hope that private interests will not destroy that.
PS: Here is a video of that stressful flight. I guess the deathgrip at 0:43 is a dead giveaway =)
I wouldn’t say I worry the night before a flight, but for a more “important” flight I am more or less obsessed with weather forecasts a week in advance. I am of course aware that forecasts a week in advance don’t say anything much and there is in any case not anything I could do about it. But still…
Yes I do think weather is the main factor – simply because we don’t have any way to get good data until just before the flight, and usually this means on the morning of the flight when airports open and start producing metars, with tafs following a bit later.
So one loses sleep because one doesn’t have the data 
For me, it would be same VFR or IFR.
Professional (airline) pilots have much better equipment: de-ice, radar, 5000fpm rate of climb, and they will get fired if they refuse to do a flight where the wx is above operator minima 
This is a fantastic thread I discover.
I feel it the same way as my nights before any flight are less quiet in any way. I often questioned myself about my strategies to handle go/no-go decisions and paid a lot of attention to any publication treating the subject. As I adopted a more conservative manner to handle any kind of decision making with time.
I always thought that anything learned or begun when I was a kid or a teenager never threatened me later. Everything I begun in a more mature age (I was 44 when I made my PPL) never will find me reckless. I learned to play football very young and made a quite respectable career I gave up at 25. I still practise it more than 30 years later and have not any fear to get hurt (which occurs of course but with lesser severity though compared to others less experienced). I can’t even imagine to get hurt which seems quite unhealthy (my cardiologist encourages me a lot to persist but my orthopaedic surgeon seems less delighted ). The PPL thing, I just don’t have it in the blood in the same way.
This threat is definitely interesting because Peter started it by saying that he worries even if there may be not such objective reason to worry. I think that is the point: why does one worry about things he is trained for or he even made so often that he is no more supposed to worry for?
I saw some hints in the contributions made so far. Weather remains the main factor you cannot entirely control. So there are forecasts probably better that ever before (for within the next 48h) but they are not established weather patterns repeatable as often as one would wish.
Personality has been mentioned as a factor. Very well seen in my opinion. Here is what I think: flying is all about control… and the pleasure to see that we can control things. Those you are more introverted types may confirm. Controlling everything in an aircraft and make it behave as you want it behave at every stage of a flight is a powerful pleasure and satisfaction machine. You fly your plane with your head not with your arms and feet. Mankind is dreaming of controlling life and dominating nature. Anxiety, or worry, is primarily attached to what can’t be entirely controlled. Weather, mid-air-collisions (made me really grin because this is a good one as it seems to be absurd), even ATC who requests you to do things he wasn’t supposed to ask you one minute before, loss of integrity messages of the GNSS receiver in the middle of an approach (hint to my actual reading), there are plenty of examples concerning contingency and unplanned things to happen.
Now, if you have been fitted by nature (or in some way, education) to get out pleasure or satisfaction from an unplanned event (these handyman or do-it-yourself kind of types who will surpass themself when things aren’t going as they are supposed to go, e.g. get a little nail into an even more tiny hole ), you will deal better with everything. On the other side, if you need a bigger comfort zone, you will be annoyed and deeply frustrated.
There are two interesting things to consider: training and flying are very strong confidence builders. Think about your car driving. Your everyday practise does not surely make you a better driver (as you do just the same thing thousands of times repeatedly) it just makes you forget the danger related to it. The more you fly the more you broaden your overall experience (feeling) to what reality may bring you in terms of guessing what will happen. This seems to explain why professional pilots are not undergoing this experience in the same way.
There are other factors as age to consider. Which means that these changes make us look at things differently. But the sole fact that you can’t see life when you are 50 as you see it when you are 25 is self-explaining.
Flying features 2 different ways of getting fun (there are of course others like travelling, nature). It is the sensation of flying and the controlling part. The second one is all about avionics. If you don’t get fun out of dominating some highly complicated avionics, you will probably fly in a more Piper Cub-like plane over the Alps or Pyrenees. Or both of it which is best.
You do also know a lot more about flying than 15 years ago.
I think this works both ways – you learn how to do stuff and you also learn about bad stuff. The former makes flying easier and the latter puts you off doing some stuff which you would have done otherwise.
One big factor is exposing your spouse to “accident talk”. That usually puts them off flying (“little knowledge is dangerous”) and via their lack of support / going on trips with you, this can greatly reduce your own appetite for going places. Most pilots thus avoid discussing accidents when “the family” is around
The standard crap e.g. airport PPR is fairly easy to deal with and in today’s internet-everywhere days is much easier than it used to be. On my early long trips I would sit there with a laptop trying to send a fax, struggling to get a signal on my Nokia 6310 which was hanging out of a window on the end of an RS232 cable, to some airport for PPR/PNR… I well recall trying to do this with Zurich when sitting at Wangen-Lachen in 2004
I think flying has got much easier, especially IFR which was a real bummer when it came to developing valid routes. You only need to read my early writeups to see how messy it was.
Pilot forums indeed tend to be negative, but it is IMHO a fact of all successful human enterprise that solid progress is made only by planning to avoid the stuff that won’t work. Basically you stand on the shoulders of those who screwed it up, so you don’t The “cheer leader… it will be allright on the night” personality always hits the rocks pretty fast… One thing we don’t have here on EuroGA is the “boycott any airport charging more than £10” kind of mentality, which damages both flying and the airports themselves.
Alexis wrote:
sometimes I even have the feeling that I get even more nervous than 15 years ago,
You do also know a lot more about flying than 15 years ago. And you, like all of us, have read countless accident reports and hear a lot you did not know of when you started out.
When I look at my logbook from my beginnings, I notice that not a lot would stop me from going on planned trips, I would simply go and take it as it comes. Today, I spend more time pre-planning, studying particularly the weather and also local specialities and often enough simply decide that it’s not worth the hassle.
15 years ago flying was indeed simpler in many ways, even if we had a lot less gadgets and tools to plan and often waste our time. The longer I look at particularly the met part, the more I become aware that despite the fact that we have more information, the final accuracy has not improved a lot. All the long range models do is to make people insecure and finally get them to give up. I reckon the same goes for the fact that lots of airports today require major research into PPR, Handling, customs pre-notices, e.t.c. which was simply not there 15 years ago.
And we also would not know about other people’s horror experiences at various airports, ramp checks, e.t.c. which often get blown out of proportion in some forums, but still instill a negative ground tone into one’s mind set.
So no wonder people worry about all sorts of “might happen”s before a flight, if they constantly hear such stuff from everywhere.
I have a tendency to sometimes fly a trip twice. Once in the aircraft and again that night. I just run through the flight again in my mind.
Yes, my feelings are very similar to your Alexis. The day before they are full of what-ifs then those feelings fade by the time I have done the external checks and am in a piloting mindset. And yes, I also have a number of flyable trips replaced with other means because some aspect of the flight appeared intimidating.
Actually no … and sometimes I even have the feeling that I get even more nervous than 15 years ago, which might have to do that I do more ambitious IFR flights today.
An intersting observation I made was that once the wheels have left the ground my worries or slight nervouseness are all gone and replaced by concentration … I remember a flight to Poland a year ago that was almost completely in IMC, from 500 ft after takeoff to 1000 ft AGL before landing and all in heavy rain and through very dark clouds … doesn’t bother me much once i am IN there … but the day before, when I KNOW that it will be rather bad I sometimes catch myself trying to find excuses why I “don’t really have to go” ;-)
Last week I cancelled a flight to the far east of CZ when I got up in the morning and it was raining and the clouds looked very dense and low … I then droved 1300 km in two days and I HATEED myself dricing under a partly blues sky … ,it was clear after 50 km that it was flyable, IFR anyway, … but I had left my backpack and airplane key at home and there was a rush hour traffic jam twds the city … (Tried to comfort myself all the way with “better to be on the ground and wishing i was in the air is better than …. etc", but didn’t help much.
