Did a flight in an open trike a a few years ago (on Crete), and while I was just very slightly uneasy, I still enjoyed it very much (it was flying after all)….
Then there is a beautiful pedestrian tower here in Frankfurt… sure feels uneasy climbing up the stairs… but the views are still nice…
From the net:
While it may not be uncommon to feel a sense of unease when standing and looking down from great heights, some individuals—around a third of the population—experience either height intolerance or acrophobia, which is a fear of heights severe enough to affect one’s quality of life, according to a 2020 research review in the Journal of Neurology.
Guess everybody is more or less affected and uneasy in some situations…
Take my first visit to a skyscraper in NYC, the Chrysler building, in 1979. The ear popping ride up was something, but getting out of the elevator and putting my face to the glass window just took my breath away and had me go weak in the knees… I’ll never forget that, nor the repeat next day in one of the WTCs 
@hazek yes I am probably more afraid of falling, especially from a height.
I can get on and off a ladder onto my lower roof 20’ or so, without problem.
But getting on an off the ladder onto the 40’ part of my roof brings a lot of stress.
I’m not sure whether that equates to a fear of heights or a fear of falling.🙂
Jokingly, most people have a fear of depths or drops, not heights. You can look up at something high and not be scared 
These may be separate and even unrelated fears (heights, falling, the edge, the unknown, death, loss of control) manifesting as the same result.
I’m ok with heights, and ok with boats, but looking over the rail of a larger ship makes me uneasy. As a child on cross-channel ferries it terrified me. Possibly a forgotten traumatic event still residing in the subconscious?
I recently did Richie’s plank experience on a VR headset, and found it impossible to step off the plank despite knowing I was really in the office, so there must be some deep-rooted survival instinct.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, an early zoologist and evolutionist, believed in racial/inherited memory: in this case, cavemen were scared of cliffs, so we are too. It was disproved, then later dismissed as racist, but recently there is supporting evidence: laboratory mice display a fear response to a recording of an eagle’s call, despite never having heard it before. This can be reproduced with new sounds, e.g. when a buzzer is associated with electric shock, the second generation fears the buzzer, despite zero exposure to the stimuli or first generation.
I think height loses its meaning, beyond a certain point. We can all relate to the possibility of falling off a 2 metre wall, hitting our heads and breaking a leg, but look down 2000 feet and I don’t have the same visceral sense of the distance or consequences of falling. The disproof of this, is arguably the dread that people feel when looking off a skyscraper or cliff, but in most cases you can see an immediate drop in addition to the big drop.
Capitaine wrote:
Jokingly, most people have a fear of depths or drops
I agree.
I never had a fear of heights and never felt scared of a drop until I started IR training – in one lesson, I was flying at FL60 and needed to come down to 2000ft. It was just a beautiful blue sky with the cloud tops at 3,000ft.
I started to descend at around 150kt and 500ft/min. The closer I got to the clouds, the better I realised how fast I was flying at.
And then, around 5 seconds before I got into the cloud… that really scared me. It was like I was falling at high speed. Maybe it was the realisation of the speed + descending + going into IMC, but it was a funny feeling.
Now, that I’m used to it, It’s just like a rollercoaster ride. Love it! :)
kwlf wrote:
I think height loses its meaning, beyond a certain point. We can all relate to the possibility of falling off a 2 metre wall, hitting our heads and breaking a leg, but look down 2000 feet and I don’t have the same visceral sense of the distance or consequences of falling. The disproof of this, is arguably the dread that people feel when looking off a skyscraper or cliff, but in most cases you can see an immediate drop in addition to the big drop.
That’s my personal theory too. At 2K ft, everything is very far away. It’s hard to be scared of something that is far away.
That’s my personal theory too. At 2K ft, everything is very far away. It’s hard to be scared of something that is far away.
Reminds me of an old Spanish joke. Someone falls of a very high building and thinks “well, so far so good”.
I did hang gliding and paragliding, scuba diving, felt no fear. I climbed 600 meter walls in the alps.
Fear in this field from my point of view is 99% related to the amount of trust I have to the tools I use (e.g. an aircraft) and the abilities I (think that I) have (e.g. piloting skills). When rock climbing I trust in the materials and in my buddy. However, I do have a lot of respect. I once noted and was very aware about the shift between respect and fear of height. It was my first wall in the alps and after we climbed it and had enough of the spectacular views we had to use the rope to go down again, one by one, vertical. The moment where you stand at the top of that enormous rock, straight down, feel the wind in the face and you have to move your body over the edge, trusting that the rope (sorry: the ropes, because we had two of them) will hold you – that I will never forget. Respect makes you cautious, makes you double check everything, up to if your backpack sits tight (by the way @Peter I had that very backpack with me that we both have) so that nothing falls down. It broadens the vision. But fear narrows the brain, you get slippery, and start to forget even easy things. I said to our guide that I’m at the end of respect and the beginning of fear, and that was very precise. I requested my buddy to do another check to see whether I’m fine and nothing’s too off that I knotted into the rope. I’m grateful to have had the experience, because I now know how it feels and how to overcome it.
I’m just normally afraid of heights – I won’t get too close to a cliff edge for example. I’ve flown varius open-cockpit things like a gyrocopter and a Waco – including going inverted. None of that has bothered me.
But just once I was on quite a long flight, somewhere over the southern california sdeswert at about 8500 feet, and I suddenluy started to think, all that holding me up here is a thin layer of metal. For a few minutes I was quite uncomfortable. Got over it and it hasn’t happened since.
My wife is a lot more sensitive to heights than me, and for example, really doesn’t life shelf roads in the mountains. But she’s fine in the plane.
