According to Cleveland Clinic, about 25 million Americans suffer from aerophobia, or the extreme fear of flying. Until now, nervous travelers could seek relief in various apps like Valk or SkyGuru, which offer in-flight breathing exercises or gives you real-time alerts about expected turbulences so you can be mentally prepared. But Kansas City is betting on a whole new and different approach.
On February 28, the city will unveil its first new terminal in 50 years at the Kansas City International Airport. Four years in the making, the $1.5 billion, 1 million-square-foot terminal will have a family play zone, an outdoor courtyard, all-gender restrooms—and something called a “flight experience simulator.” You’d be forgiven for imagining a Disney-style, multisensory attraction with loud noises and shaking seats, but that’s not what this is about.
Designed by local experience design firm Dimensional Innovations, the simulator is a down-to-earth, educational, and surprisingly tech-filled experience that isn’t there to entertain. Instead, the experience allows travelers to get acquainted with every step of the boarding process and practice take-off and landing—in a real, decommissioned Airbus 321 cabin.
The simulator room is located airside, right across a Lego store, which alone should help folks chill out a bit. The experience kicks off with a check-in kiosk that prints out a dummy boarding card, which you then must scan to get through the gate. A light switches from red to green and you proceed onto a jet bridge that offers views of the tarmac, except of course, the view is just a realistic photograph of a tarmac that was overlaid on a wall made to look exactly like the structure of a jet bridge, complete with an acrylic sheet to emulate the glass.
The corridor then curves and leads you into the cabin of the plane that the Dimensional Innovation team purchased from a scrap yard in Kansas City, sliced in half, decked out with screens, hidden speakers, and various computers snuck inside the cavity where the food cart once was. “We wanted to make it as lifelike as possible,” says Ryan Grey, a senior designer at Dimension Innovations who led the project. And since they could only fit in two rows with 12 seats total, they borrowed a page from that Inception scene with the seemingly endless bridge, and used trick photography to simulate the rest of the plane on a wallpaper at the back.
Once inside, people are instructed to sit, strap on their safety belt, and watch an air hostess on a screen explain everything that’s going to happen during the experience and give everyone the standard safety lecture. From there, the plane is ready to take-off. To make the experience as realistic as possible, the designers built screens into the windows that show what you would see if you looked out a window while taking off—in this case, a view of the plane parked at the gate, busied workers on the tarmac, then a moving landscape, and finally an overview of Kansas City. (The process repeats in reverse as the plane “lands.”)
The team didn’t have the funding to emulate turbulences as that would’ve entailed attaching the fuselage on large mechanisms that make it shake, so this is a “chill flight” with “no adverse weather” says Chris Riebschlager, director of creative technology at Dimensional Innovations. But the team did build realism through sound by recording real-life noise from inside an aircraft cabin and a jet bridge, so you can hear what you’d normally hear, namely ambient noise, people chatting, occasional dings, and footsteps. Plus, the cabin smells like a real cabin, because it is.
The experience is likely the first of its kind in the U.S. But the big question remains: can any of this actually help people be a little less apprehensive of flying? Only time will tell. There’s no one-size-fits-all treatment to aerophobia, but experts say that it helps to understand your triggers, then expose yourself to them instead of avoiding them. Cognitive behavioral therapy tailored to flying is an option, and educating yourself about how planes fly and why turbulences occur can help, too.
The Dimensional Innovations team didn’t consult with any psychologists, but they made a big effort to understand what it’s like to be afraid of flying. They interviewed about 30 people with aerophobia, including people with autism, people with a visual or hearing impairment, and elderly folks. The process revealed that people are most anxious about how they’re going to get to their gates, then once they’re on the plane, they were nervous about claustrophobia, loud noises, and turbulence. People may still need to rely on an app for the latter. But the other concerns are the reason why the team decided to simulate the full boarding process, ending with a real-life plane for maximum immersion. “It’s about the physicality of the cabin and the parts that lead up to the cabin,” says Grey. “It’s the cumulation of everything coming together that really makes the experience justifiable.”
And by everything, they mean everything. You can even squeeze into the plane’s tiny restroom and get used to just how claustrophobic it is in there. Just don’t go flushing things down the toilet. This is just a simulation, remember?
