For a very large part of the travelling public, the thought of flying can cause so much anxiety that even the most important travel plans have to be cancelled.
Even newly wed couples have had to make last minute changes to their honeymoon plans because one partner was unable to fly.
What causes the fear is sometimes unknown or the person has a general anxious personality, but most often it's the result of a bad experience on a flight.
Unknown to the anxious traveller quite often is that their fear is based on a whole series of misunderstandings.
Most anxious flyers believe that the whole business of flying is balanced on a knife edge and that if the slightest thing were to go wrong then they would be doomed.
They often believe that it's hard to fly a modern jet airliner, whereas nothing could be further from the truth.
However, anyone who believes either of those things will always describe their flights in highly emotive language, because, from their point of view everything is dangerous.
The effect of describing things in emotive language is to constantly re-affirm and strengthen their fears.
The constantly recurring theme that tops the list of all worries is the dreaded T word.
Turbulence.
Almost everyone who has a fear of flying mentions turbulence.
How they were thrown around and lost tens of thousands of feet and how hard it was for the pilot to control the plane.
Sadly this is also a long way from the truth...
planes don't drop that far in turbulence...
they hardly change height at all.
From a pilots' point of view it's no harder to fly a plane in turbulence than in calm weather.
Next in line in the list of fears is the Go Around...
but as that takes a little explaining so I'll leave that for the next article.
Captain Keith Godfrey