My friend Cath gets into her airplane seat like a death-row inmate being strapped into an electric chair. There’s the same combination of terror and resignation in her eyes that comes from the certainty of imminent doom.

Like one out of six Americans, Cath suffers from fear of flying. One look at her tense face and white knuckles before takeoff is enough to put any Erica Jong jokes out of my mind. Her body language is that of a trapped animal: her anxious eyes dart from one corner of the plane to the next, looking for hidden dangers; her ears perk up at the slightest change in the tone of the plane’s engines. “Is something the matter?” she hisses every time the plane dips its wings. “How much longer till we land?” she asks the attendant 17 times in the course of a two-hour flight.

Fear of flying seems an odd malady to afflict the nation that flies more passenger miles than the rest of the world combined. But America is home to more victims of aviophobia (yes, that’s the term for it) than any other country in the world. It’s second in the national list of phobias, exceeded only by fear of public speaking. Since this is America, there are also plenty of remedies offered by a variety of institutes and clinics, including Boston’s improbably named Institute for the Psychology of Air Travel. Cath’s tried them all. Therapy sessions, books with titles like “Fearless Flying,” meditation, even hypnosis. Nothing worked.

One therapist tried to cure her with common sense. “The odds of being killed in an avalanche are actually greater than those of dying in a plane crash,” he explained. “You’re twice as likely to be struck by lightning.” Cath boarded her next flight clutching a chart that helpfully explained the odds (risk of dying of a gunshot in America: one in 9,450; risk of dying in an airline crash: one in 8,450,000). Statistically, you’d have to fly every single day for 8,200 years to find yourself in an air accident with multiple fatalities. Flying, it seems, is actually safer than walking.

But there are statistics, and there’s Cath. “I’m scared of trusting the airlines,” she muttered, staring at the chart as if to convince herself. “I’m scared of dying trusting.” She obsessively looks up planes on the Web site of the National Transportation Safety Board to make sure the kind she’s boarding hasn’t crashed in living memory. She takes an aisle seat so she can avoid looking out the window. She wears cotton because synthetics will burn more easily in an airplane fire, and slip-on shoes so heels won’t impede her if she needs to slide down an escape chute.

Enter the virtual-reality solution. “A 21st-century cure!” Cath exclaimed, telling me she’d started “virtual-reality exposure therapy.” She had to strap on a headset with small video monitors and stereophonic earphones that turned her doctor’s clinic into a virtual airplane, complete with engine noise, captain’s announcements, visuals and even vibrations. The idea: to gradually “desensitize” her to situations that produce anxiety, from sitting in an aircraft on the runway to flying through turbulence to landing on a bumpy airstrip. The company offering the treatment had even invented a virtual Vietnam that cured posttraumatic stress disorder in shellshocked war vets. But Cath couldn’t do better than a dishonorable discharge. She took the headset off just as scared as when she put it on.

The clinic gave up. “What you’ve got is generalized anxiety, not just aviophobia,” she was told. “Here’s a prescription for Lorazepam. Take this before you fly.” But that gives Cath a new dilemma. “I could take the tranquilizer to ease my fear of flying,” she says. “But then how could I be alert during a crash landing?” Call it Cath-22.