Everything you never knew about aviophobia and how to overcome it

For mild aviophobia experts recommend staying hydrated and avoiding alcohol, tea and coffee during a flight.

They also advise deep, slow breathing to help relaxation and to introduce more oxygen into the body.

For more severe cases, where the panic begins hours or days before a flight and can even lead to avoiding flying altogether, hypnotherapy or special flight courses have been known to help.

In the past 25 years more than 45,000 people have attended Flying With Confidence courses, endorsed by British Airways, at Heathrow, Gatwick, Edinburgh, Glasgow and New York airports.

The one-day course explains what causes turbulence, with reassurance as to why it is uncomfortable but not dangerous, and offers guidance from psychologists on how to control fears and anxieties.

The day finishes with a flight on a BA jet with refreshments provided.

A flight-only option is also available for friends or family of those taking part in the course.

It claims a 98 per cent success rate.

For most people, terror of flying may restrict the kind of holiday you can have but otherwise you can probably live with it.

It becomes harder if you have the kind of job where travel is obligatory - unless you are important enough to insist on alternative arrangements.

The ultimate example of that was North Korea's supreme leader Kim Jong-Il, who inherited the phobia from his father Kim Il-Sung (giving the lie to the latter's fearless reputation in his country's official version of history).

Given North Korea's isolation international travel has never featured heavily in the leader's job description and when the second Kim did need to go abroad he went by train.

Some aviation refuseniks have never been on a plane in their lives. But others are frequent flyers whose fear gradually creeps up on them, either because they decide the odds of a crash are rising the more flights they take, or because of a particularly terrifying experience (which frequent flyers and those who use small private jets are more likely to encounter).

Ronald Reagan developed his phobia after a rough flight to the Californian island of Catalina in 1937.

He was offered a contract to narrate and occasionally act on the Sunday night TV programme General Electric Theater in 1954.

To earn his £93,000 ($150,000) annual salary he was required to make regular visits to General Electric plants and had it written into his contract that he must travel by train.

By the time he ran for governor of California in 1966, political ambition had finally trumped fear of flying. But it was still an ordeal.

When a fellow passenger remarked that he seemed to have overcome the phobia, he retorted: "Overcome it, hell. I'm holding this plane up in the air by sheer willpower."

The former Abba singer Agnetha F¤ltskog is often described as a recluse but she revealed recently that she stopped travelling with her bandmates because of a terror of flying.

This followed a traumatic experience flying between New York and Boston during a US tour in 1979 when their private jet hit a tornado: "I try not to think of it, as it was terrifying," she said.

"The pilot failed to land at the first attempt but then we landed at the second try. I already had a fear but this event was a turning point."

For eight years after that she insisted on taking a private coach but in 1978 her bus overturned in Sweden and she was thrown through the window.

After the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, Americans who were suddenly afraid of flying took to the country's roads.

This may have been an understandable decision but in statistical terms it was irrational. It duly led to a signifi-cant increase in fatal road crashes.

The American film director Stanley Kubrick was so terrified of flying that he shot many of his films in Britain, his adopted home.

That's why the Vietnam war movie Full Metal Jacket was shot in Kent and Essex, while the creepy Overlook Hotel from his classic horror film The Shining was created at Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire.

An orgy scene at a Manhattan mansion in Eyes Wide Shut was filmed at Highclere Castle, now better known as the location for Downton Abbey.

A fear of flying is no more or less irrational than doing the lottery. In both cases, people are anticipating an outcome whose probability is extremely low but whose consequence is very profound.

The statistics may show that the outcome is massively unlikely. You are 19 times safer in a plane than a car but for some people the dread is so great that the magnitude of the potential disaster obscures its tiny likelihood.

The former Arsenal footballer Dennis Bergkamp has just published an autobiography in which he reveals his dread of flying began long before he got in the air.

"It got so bad I would look up at the sky during away games to see what the weather was like," he writes.

"Were there any clouds coming? Sometimes I was preoccupied by the flight home while I was playing football. It was hell."

In 1995, when he joined Arsenal from Inter Milan, the non-flying Dutchman stipulated he would no longer travel in planes.

This meant his European away days were restricted to fixtures in northern Europe easily accessible by road or rail. His continued refusal to fly almost certainly rules him out as an eventual successor to Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger.

Much of the ritual of commercial flying, such as serving drinks and meals, was originally designed to distract people from the unnerving thought of being in a tin can up in the sky. But some passengers are in no mood to be distracted.

One woman on the Flying With Confidence course said she had been convinced for years that the "bing bong" sounds you hear in planes was a secret code for the cabin crew to get ready for disaster.

In 2004 the movie star Doris Day was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W Bush.

A diehard Republican she was overwhelmed by the honour, saying: "I am deeply grateful to the President and to my country. To come from Cincinnati, Ohio, for God's sake, then to go to Hollywood and to get this kind of tribute from my country. I love this country so much."

Despite that she didn't go to Washington to pick up the award because of her terror of flying. She has refused other gongs completely, including an honorary Oscar, rather than fly to accept them.