It's not flying at altitude that scares me. It's other passengers

Among my many phobias, the fear of heights is the weirdest. I only have to look at someone standing near a sheer drop to break out in a sweat and feel my legs turn to jelly. Even old photos of unharnessed workers building skyscrapers make me feel queasy.

Yet, I'll happily jump on an aircraft and watch a storm light up the clouds thousands of feet below. In the metal cocoon of an Airbus or Boeing, it's not the height that scares me.

It's the fellow passengers.

The close confinement that keeps my acrophobia at bay triggers other fears.

The terrors start with the percussive cough a row or two behind me. Before we've even pushed back, it's insistent and alarming and way too close for comfort. All sorts of exotic diseases come to mind, their spore dispersed into the cabin with every hack. I shrink into my seat as the tussaphobia takes hold, followed closely by irrational thanatophobia - or fear of fatal disease.

It's entirely irrational because the air on aircraft is much cleaner than what I've inhaled in the airport. It's recirculated every two to three minutes and passed through hospital-grade HEPA filters, which trap most of the nasties.

For some reason the announcement that we're almost ready for take-off is a cue for passengers to leap up from their seats, open the overhead locker that's just been closed by the cabin crew, and fidget for some absolutely essential item they should have retrieved much earlier. It takes a mountain of self-control not to scream "Just sit down!"

If I'm unlucky enough to sit next to a fidgeter who either cracks their knuckles, jiggles their legs or obsessively twirls their hair, a bout of misokinesia - the intense aversion to fidgeting - is inevitable. Again, it's entirely irrational given the poor person fidgeting, unlike me, most likely hates flying.

That's probably why they insist on using their mobile phones to send texts and post on social media well after they've been told to switch to flight mode. Their aerophobia brings on unbearable nomophobia - no mobile phobia, that dread of digital disconnection - which might also explain their fidgeting.