Tools for fear of flying — backed by published research.
Airene helps you cope with anxiety before, during, and after a flight. Each tool maps to a study on what actually works. Built to work offline, in airplane mode.
One tap, from anywhere
Four exercises, always in the same place
The app has no tab bar. There is one screen, and the exercises are docked along the bottom of it — in a fixed order, because a tool that moves under your thumb mid-panic is worse than a tool ranked one place too low.
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Cyclic sighing
Sighing — in the dock
Double inhale, long exhale, one to five minutes. The free tool — reachable without an account, in airplane mode, at any level of fear.
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Paced breathing
Breathing — in the dock
An expanding circle to breathe with: 4-7-8, box, or 6 breaths a minute. Visual and haptic, so it works with the screen face-down on your knee.
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Grounding
5-4-3-2-1 — in the dock
Five things you can see, four you can touch, three you can hear. A walkthrough that pulls attention out of the catastrophe and into the cabin.
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Mental rotation
Focus game — in the dock
Falling pieces you have to rotate in your head. Loads the same visuospatial working memory that intrusive images need — so there is less of it to go around.
While you're up there
The screen keeps up with the flight
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A fear meter you can drag without reading a word.
Subjective Units of Distress (SUDS), 0–100, logged every time you move it. It sits above your thumb on the in-flight screen and nothing scrolls it away.
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Tell it what's happening, or let the sensors guess.
Still on the ground, taking off, climbing, level and steady, bumpy, coming down, landing. You pick the stage; Core Motion and the barometer only hint at it. Plain language, not aviation vocabulary.
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39 narrated explainers, bundled in the app.
That clunk after take-off is the gear coming up. The engines going quiet at 1,000 feet is thrust reduction, planned before you boarded. Sounds, sensations, procedures — sorted by the stage you're actually in.
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A guide to the whole flight, before it starts.
Take-off, climb, turbulence, descent, landing — what each one does to the aircraft and why the sensations that come with it are normal. Available whether or not a flight is running.
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Turbulence, forecast for your route.
Downloaded before departure from NOAA's global model, so it's there in airplane mode. When bumps are due within about fifteen minutes, the screen says so first — being surprised is the part that hurts.
After you land
The curve is the point
Anxiety that rises and then falls on its own is the mechanism exposure therapy relies on. Seeing your own flight drawn that way — shaded by stage, peak marked, the drop unmissable — is how the lesson sticks.
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What you predicted, next to what happened.
Before boarding you rate how likely catastrophe, panic, and turbulence feel. Afterwards the app puts those numbers beside the flight you actually had.
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One question, once you're on the ground.
“What did this flight teach you?” — a single field, kept on your device, waiting for the next time fear tells you it knows how this goes.
Why it works
Every tool traces to a paper
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Cyclic sighing.
Five-minute protocol of double-inhale then slow exhale.
Balban, Spiegel & Huberman (2023), Cell Reports Medicine.
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Visuospatial working-memory load.
Tetris-style rotation interrupts intrusive imagery.
Holmes, James et al. (2010, 2017), PLOS ONE.
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5-4-3-2-1 grounding.
Naming what your senses can reach pulls attention off the catastrophe. One taught session dropped high anxiety from 23% of students to 4%.
Scott, Duncan & McCoy (2026), Teaching and Learning in Nursing.
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SUDS-tiered toolkit.
Routing the right tool to the right level of distress.
Wolpe (1969); refined in modern CBT.
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Inhibitory learning.
Anxiety naturally rises and falls — seeing the post-flight curve is part of how that lesson sticks.
Craske et al. (2008, 2014), Behaviour Research and Therapy.
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Heart Rate Variability (HRV) biofeedback (planned for v1.x).
Slow paced breath matched to heart rhythm.
Goessl, Curtiss & Hofmann (2017), Psychological Medicine, g ≈ 0.81.
What it doesn't do
Airene is a set of tools, not a treatment
If your fear of flying significantly affects your life — beyond the moments around boarding — please speak to a clinician. The app says the same thing, in the same words, on the screen where you'd look for it.
- VALK Foundation
Leiden, Netherlands. Treatment programme run with KLM pilots and clinical psychologists.
- SOAR
Course from an airline captain who is also a licensed therapist. Free videos, paid programme.
- Flying with Confidence
British Airways one-day course: pilots, cabin crew, a psychologist, and a flight at the end.
Or speak to your GP about a referral.
Privacy
Your fear ratings are yours
- Stays on your device
- Your SUDS values, reflections, predictions and flight history. Sign in and they sync between your own devices — nowhere else, and to no one else.
- Leaves your device
- Anonymous usage analytics: which tools you opened, how long an exercise ran, your device model, iOS version and country. Tied to a random per-install ID that is never joined to your account. One switch in Settings turns it off.
- Never collected
- What you type. What you rate your fear at. Advertising identifiers. Your location — the app reads it during a flight to help detect the phase, and it never leaves the phone.
