One of them flies regularly and hates every minute. Another hasn't flown since 1976. Then there's Linda who has never been on an airplane.

Meet the participants of Flight Without Fear, one of a growing number of courses offered by airlines and private groups finding rising demand from grounded baby-boomers.

This eight-week course held twice a year in Denver started about 25 years ago and takes up to 20 people a time, organized by the Colorado chapter of the nonprofit group The Ninety-Nines, an international organization of women pilots.

Donna Miller, a pilot and chairwoman of the program, said the number of similar courses appeared to be on the rise although there was no data to back this up -- but so was the age of people seeking to overcome their fear of flying. The average age on a course that ended this month was about 55.
"The world is getting smaller with more people traveling for work and for leisure," Miller told Reuters.

"With the population aging we are getting more and more retirees who have money and want to travel."

Take Linda Murrah, 64, a church administrator, who had never been on a plane before and was a successful graduate from the latest course.
She said her father had instilled a fear of flying in her when she was child, telling her she could be harmed, and this denial of getting on a plane kept building as she got older.

"When I retired this year I knew I had put myself in a huge box that I needed to fight my way out of," she told Reuters.

"I had claustrophobia, the fear the plane would go down and I would die, fear of being sick, I was scared of everything that had to do with what was going on."

QUEEN OF THE AIR

Murrah joined 14 others on the course, meeting once a week and studying three primary components: the process of a flight and how an airport works, the mental obstacles with a volunteer licensed psychologist teaching the students ways to overcome their fears, and then learning techniques to relax.
After eight weeks, students graduated by hopping on a flight of about an hour from Denver to Kansas City for breakfast at an airport hotel -- then back on a plane home.

Murrah was one of the 13 who succeeded. One person dropped out in the course and another could not face the actual flight after being terrified by a simulator session.

"I was elated. I felt like I was queen of the air. I was nervous getting on but then the fear was gone in a flash. This really took the monkey off my back," said Murrah, who is planning to fly to her daughter in Tennessee for Christmas.
Miller said a key part of the course was learning the process of flying to take away the uncertainty.

"Once people have this knowledge it really isn't so scary," she said, proud of the 97 percent success rate of the course, which is sponsored by Denver-based Frontier Airlines.

"It can make a huge difference to people's lives. One woman hadn't been to visit her family in Britain for 25 years until she took this course and now goes every year, while for others it's catalyst for them to go onto something they have feared."

But for those who don't succeed?

"Sometimes people are not ready after the first course so we let them come back again," said Miller. "Generally, after the second time, they are ready."