It had the opposite effect on me. I got into quite deep into simming a few years ago and I went down the rabbit hole.
It definitely increased my fear of flying knowing how little it takes to bring an aircraft down. Sort of like seeing behind the curtain. One improperly installed bolt, an unapproved replica part with poor tolerance making it into the spares, a piece of duct tape left on a sensor during routing maintenance etc.
You're kinda missing my point. Many, of not most of the ACI episodes are about crashes in the 80s or further back, involving much older aircraft. Procedures and policies have inmporved steadily ever since. The pirate part issue was a big problem in the US in the 70s and 80s, but they seem to have rooted it out. We also now have more sophisticated equipment to look for stuff like metal fatigue and hairline fractures, rather than relying on eyeballing it. There's a whole host of changes over the last 40+ years that makes flying even old aircraft vastly safer than it was in the old days.
I’m worried about flying again due to these planes having being parked at airports for months doing nothing and suddenly fired up and used.
Airlines are cycling through their fleet to do their current reduced schedules specifically to avoid this problem. Also, if the aircraft has been in storage for a certain amount of time (not sure how long), it has to be serviced before it can fly again - a very expensive business if you have to do it all at once for your whole fleet. So whether they're parked or used often, this won't be a problem either way.
That's nothing - I flew through the middle of a mad thunderstorm from Singapore to Jo'burg, for hours across the whole bl00dy crossing of the Indian Ocean!! Wings looked like they may "flap right off" many times, horrible experience!
I haven't been on a flight to or from the East that wasn't turbulent. And I live out here, so I do it often.
I've often wondered why they don't just change altitude and go above the storm.
On the route from SG it's not just about storms. You're flying through the
Intertropical Convergence Zone (a.k.a. the Doldrums). Yes, this area has a lot of storms, but even in crystal clear weather, there can be an awful lot of turbulence. You pass through it coming back from Europe too, but you pass through at a much steeper angle, so you're through it much quicker. I suspepect it's also less pronounced over land. From SG and HK, you're going diagonally through it, so you spend much more time in that zone, over a warm ocean. Yeah, wild ride.