Dealing with anxiety before flying

[Bill Greenwood]

Wt , maybe this flying thing is not for you. There's lots of other activities that people like to do , golf, bowling, and where there is no real danger in failing.
Frankly, it sounds like you have somehow convinced yourself that for some reason, perhaps age, you are not good enough to fly and you are happy with that image of yourself. And you know yourself better than anyone else; maybe you really are not up to it. So be it. Nothing anyone else says can change what is inside your head anymore than someone telling me how good beets taste is going to make me like them. I am a terrible dancer even after taking lessons, and others telling me how easy it is.
About the only other thing I could suggest is to go out to an airport and watch other students make practice landings. If that doesn't give you the urge to want to do it yourself, then why bother?

And wearing a headset in a normal plane is about as vital as wearing a batting glove to play baseball, or a do rag to play football. A headset is nice especially in a noisy airplane, and at tower airports, but people flew for decades before they had radios, much less headsets. What kind of headset did Lindberg wear on the way to Paris? What kind do most glider pilots wear?