As Scott Barrett pointed out the other day, hang gliding instructors have to deal  all the time with the fear that their students reasonably feel. By encouraging their students to press ahead with things that they are uncomfortable with, but that are just one step beyond what they have done before enough times to have captured how to do it, they make sure that their students don't go too far and hurt themselves. Fear is an ever present factor in the instruction process, so instructors are very familiar with it.

I was thinking about fear the other day, because going over the back along the coast line and staying up in rolling hills by the force of an on shore flow was something I had never done before. Whenever I have flown at the beach in high winds, I've had a line of dunes, escarpment, or other obvious indicators of where to fly and find the lift.

When I followed Scott over the back of Moonee Beach on that day there was no obvious (to me at least) spot to go to to find the lift, other than the small cliffs right over the water. In addition, there was no safe place to land at the beach, there being little to no beach. Those circumstance heightened my fear and decreased my ability to figure out how to solve the puzzle. I didn't and landed because I suddenly couldn't figure out the wind direction even though I had been flying in it for the last hour and it didn't change its direction in the last few minutes. The brain was obviously straining in first gear.

In other circumstances, like approaching a new launch, pilots should be aware that they are going to experience some fear and that it will cause them to think less well than they would if they weren't experiencing any fear. All their skills will degrade more or less depending on how much fear they feel.

Pilots should be willing to admit that they some times experience fear, so that they can deal with it realistically and not do things that require all their mental abilities to do safely. Instructors already know that they have to deal with fear in their students explicitly.