Need some asperger advice please anyone.

[tontoco]

Ive booked a surprise break for hubbys birthday, flights hotel etc all in place. Ive got 4 kids, none of them have ever flew before, so ive booked dublin, a short flight to break them in. However my asperger son (11) has started saying he wont ever go on a plane. Every holiday advert that comes on or plane that goes over starts the same conversation. Him saying he wont ever fly, me asking why? Him saying they crash. Ive spoke to him about the statistics of safety in the air to the car since hes more than happy to get in a car everyday. But hes adament he wont go on a plane, yesterday he had a meltdown over it. None of the kids or hubby know ive booked it, so i dont know why hes suddenley developed this fear.
Any ideas how i can talk him round? Or any tips to avoid a meltdown when we get to the airport?
TIA

We have the same issue with ds1. He will absolutely not entertain the thought of flying and decided that well before all the recently publicity about plane crashes. More recently he's become really hung up on it, presumably from hearing so much on the news about it. Now I doubt there is any way at all that we could get him onto one.

We go to Ireland regularly, always by ferry, but he's been doing that since he was 10 weeks old, so is used to it.

As bbkl said, sometimes with ds it's better to spring things on ds at the last minute, rather than giving him days/weeks to get more and more anxious about it. Having said that, this isn't one of the situations where I would try it, as with ds, there would be a very high likelihood we wouldn't be able to get him on the plane when we needed to and would lose our money as a result.

I think we'd have to do lots and lots of talking and prep beforehand, stress that it's a really short flight with a great safety record and address each of his worries/fears repeatedly until he started to accept it. It would probably involve several trips to the airport as well.

Is there no possibility you could cancel your tickets and book the ferry instead? My three love the ferry and treat is as part of their holiday.

Is there and way that you could arrange a trip to the airport - for just you and him.

Contact them beforehand and explain the situation. Hopefully they'll work with you on this.

thanks for the replies, I did look at the ferry but was hoping to introduce all of the children to flying, so we can go further afield one day hopefully :-/ I have been intouch with the airline and they have arranged a guide for us be with us from when we get to the airport to when we take off. I was thinking of telling just him because he is quite good with secrets, but feared giving it more time to fester and make him worse. he is usually better to have things sprung upon him, so that the excitement or in this case fears cant escalate too much.

Any air museums around where you could look at planes and maybe even sit in one, talk to a pilot etc?

Is he generally scared of heights or is it flying-specific?

I had a friend with a younger ASD son who was fine with flying as long as he could do his favourite distraction thing of tearing up paper. Does your ds have anything he turns to to lower stress?

Bit thin on ideas, but hope they help

We don't have any air museums near us. Hes not scared of heights, his reasoning is that planes crash. ive told him that more cars crash than planes and that hes happy to get into a car everyday. his answer to that is that not all cars blow up when they crash :o(
he doesn't really have a way of coping with stress that weve found yet. weve tried him with stress toys (tangle toy, stress ball etc) but they don't seem to help.