The Illusion of Control: There are several suggestions in places such as this reddit thread. For instance, one of them is about the illusion of control with driving. As the quote below illustrates, psychologists know that human comfort is directly tied to a sense of agency. You hold the wheel, you brake, you turn or accelerate (does that mean we will come to have similar concerns about self driving cars in the future?). Walking onto your flight you give up your agency in the matter of your personal safety to anonymous strangers behind closed doors, even though they are highly trained professionals backed by highly redundant layers of technology. You feel more comfortable on flights where a competent looking captain makes a personal visit to the back of the aircraft.

Media amplification of aviation accidents: Commercial aviation accidents are rare. So when they happen the event is in the public’s face for days and weeks on end. Add the fact that catastrophic aviation accidents have multiple casualties and the availability heuristic, an aviation accident is easily visualized and our evolutionary wiring easily characterizes these as more frequent than they really are.

Dread risk vs continuous risk: I didn’t have a named concept for this distinction till I started researching for the newsletter this week. A small excerpt from the paper that introduces the concept is given below. To quote from the paper “…"dread risk," is defined at its high end by perceived lack of control, dread, catastrophic potential, fatal consequences, and the inequitable distribution of risks and benefits”. We possess a deep, primal fear of "dread events"—rare, sudden, and highly concentrated catastrophes where a large number of people die simultaneously. And yet, we are statistically blind to "continuous risk"—the slow, steady, dispersed casualties of highway driving that silently claim vastly more lives annually than aviation ever could.