Terror in the Air : For Many Survivors, the Fear Has Just Begun

Paul Hotz cannot forget Feb. 24, when half an hour became a foul taste of eternity.

The Sydney, Australia, businessman, his wife and daughter were aboard United Airlines Flight 811 bound from Honolulu to Auckland, New Zealand, when a large hole ripped open in the right side of the aircraft, filling the cabin with wind, noise and swirling debris. Nine people died after they were blasted into the early morning darkness at 20,000 feet. Another 18 were injured by the explosive decompression.

“We were only maybe two feet away from where that hole was,” he recalled. “. . . the person sitting next to my wife was blown out of the plane.” A flight attendant near Hotz was knocked down and Hotz locked his legs around her so that she too wouldn’t be spun out of the jumbo jet.

Vivid reruns of the incident often taunt him, Hotz said. Last week, for instance, the apparel manufacturing executive, who continues to fly an average of three times a week, was waiting for a flight in Melbourne, Australia, when he heard that another United Airlines jet had crash-landed in Sioux City, Iowa. “That really threw me back,” he said in what seemed to be a massive understatement.

Hotz belongs to a growing fraternity--survivors of air disasters. More than 300 passengers made a safe return to Earth on Hotz’s flight, for example. In April, 1988, 94 of the 95 people aboard an Aloha Airlines jet survived after a large section of the fuselage ripped away over Hawaii. Last Aug. 31, 95 of 108 occupants lived when a Delta Airlines 727 jetliner crashed on takeoff in Dallas. And in last week’s drama in Iowa the living outnumbered the dead with 185 of the 296 passengers and crew surviving the fiery landing.

But the gift of life is not an untarnished prize, both victims and disaster experts say. Involuntary flashbacks such as the one experienced by Hotz are common among many survivors of air disasters, they report. Airborne calamities, they add, claim a psychological toll months, years and possibly decades afterward--in a manner comparable to the the post-traumatic stress syndrome common among Vietnam veterans.

“As time goes by the horror of it becomes more real,” Hotz said, adding that he hasn’t yet accepted the random nature of his near miss with oblivion. “I don’t think it’s something you get over. . . . I had a normal life and all of a sudden I’m flying through this horror 20,000 feet up in the sky.”

Another passenger on Flight 811, Denver attorney Bruce Lampert also says he frequently is transported back to that night over the Pacific. “People ask me if I have nightmares and I say, ‘Yes, but they don’t come at night,’ ” Lampert said. Almost anything regarding powered flight can trigger a flashback but he is especially sensitive to Hawaiian travel posters picturing jet airliners over the islands, he said.

By his count, Hotz and his family and the more than 340 remaining passengers and crew on the Boeing 747 endured 27 minutes of racking uncertainty before the pilot returned the crippled airplane to Honolulu. While those long minutes ticked by, Hotz said he underwent “torture” from the tension between the proximity of death and his desire to live. “If there’s physical or mental damage, it comes from not knowing when you’re actually going to die,” he said.

Flashbacks are only one aspect of a complex package of psychological and physiological responses to crises in the air. Reactions begin immediately after the realization that an aircraft is in danger, according to Chaytor Mason, a former Marine pilot with expertise in aviation safety, group psychology and crowd control in aircraft.

Both the pilot, other crew members and passengers are instantly hit by a “huge shot of adrenaline,” said Mason, who teaches at USC’s Institute of Safety and Systems Management and has himself survived airborne emergencies. In the case of the pilot, faced with a myriad of simultaneous problems, initial responses may be clumsy because “he has this new body which is very fast and very strong and he isn’t used to it.”

In contrast, the passengers, who have little or nothing they can do, may react with “negative panic,” Mason said. The calm often reported among passengers on airliners in trouble is deceptive, he asserted, explaining that “panic is usually handled in a quiet way. They (passengers) underreact.” In this state, passengers may be preoccupied with their own thoughts and not absorbing information from the flight crew or the flight attendants. If the airliner stays up long enough, apathy may set in, he added.

For many air crash survivors the effects may include not only flashbacks but also withdrawal from friends and relatives, “feelings of going crazy,” suicidal thoughts, emotional blunting, trouble with eating or sleeping and poor concentration, according to Barbara Feuer, director of the employee assistance program for the national Assn. of Flight Attendants.

The attendants union provides extensive peer and professional counseling for its members and others involved in air crashes, Feuer said, because it found that “providing assistance as soon as possible by peers after an emergency was crucial, was a key to dealing with the trauma.” She added, “When people say ‘I’m fine, I’ll be OK,’ they’re usually in shock,” said Feuer, who is also a psychologist.

With counseling, survivors are usually able to “get back to normal,” she said. The psychological cost of airline crashes is not limited to those immediately affected, she added. Crashes have “a ripple-down effect that is enormously traumatizing for the airline industry,” she said.

First Reaction Is Denial

Attorney Lampert said he went “through a gradual evolution of emotions” while Flight 811 struggled back to Honolulu. His first reaction was “total, absolute, complete denial” that the airplane was in trouble, he said. “It defies all logic but I was sitting there saying that hole is not there. . . . It has to be something else, a dream, because it’s not real.”

When reality set in, Lampert said he expected the jet to break up in a manner similar to that of the Pan American flight that was bombed out of the sky over Scotland last December, raining wreckage over the small town of Lockerbie. Then briefly his thoughts turned to his 11-year-old son.

After it became clear that “the plane was staying together,” Lampert said “the parade of horribles” resumed. He also felt that he was the butt of a cosmic joke. An attorney who specializes in airplane crash litigation, Lampert said he spent considerable time telling himself, “This is really ironic. Instead of being a calm lawyer I’m going to be the victim.”

But for Lampert, the most emotionally wrenching experience came after he was safely on the ground. “To a certain extent the defense mechanisms work during the crisis,” he said. “But once you’re on the ground and you step back and look at that hole--it was just like somebody dropping me in cold water.” Lampert said his knees weakened, making it hard to stand as he fully understood the enormity of his experience.

Today, because of his work, Lampert--who owns and flies a small airplane--said he finds it hard to escape constant reminders of United 811. His solution, he said, has been to submerge himself as much as possible in litigation in which he represents other passengers and relatives against airlines, including Flight 811. “I just hardened my resolve,” he said.

Desire to Flee Old Life

Meanwhile, Hotz said he sought counseling for the aftershocks of his experience on Flight 811, partly because he “wanted to give up” his former life. “I just wanted to be free of all my responsibilities,” he said. “I don’t know what I wanted, I just didn’t want to get back to day-to-day living.” The counseling helped him return to work and fulfill his duties to his family, his firm and his employees, he said.

One of his major concerns is his 6-year-old daughter, Georgia, who also is suffering after-effects. “She’s very insecure right now,” Hotz said. “She doesn’t want to be very far from her parents.”

In contrast to the prolonged experience of Lampert and Hotz, two men who walked away from last week’s ill-fated United DC-10 said that until a few minutes before the crash landing they had no idea that the trouble was potentially serious, although 41 minutes elapsed between the beginning of the emergency and the crash-landing. This was due to reassurances from the crew and the fact that from inside the passenger cabin, no damage to the plane was visible, Donald Musick and Paul Fast agreed.

Musick, a 52-year-old Ft. Wayne, Ind., engineer who was traveling with his wife, said that the pilot’s report of trouble in one of three engines did not make him panic. “I still felt it was no problem,” he said. “I didn’t feel like I was comfortable but I didn’t think I was going to die.” In fact, Musick was certain that the plane would not crash almost until the moment it happened. “My wife and I, we really never expected a crash because it always happens to other people,” he said, adding that the passengers had been told only to “expect a rough landing and possibly worse.”

About 10 minutes before landing, Musick noticed that the pilot’s voice became somewhat more excited. “You could detect a note that you didn’t hear before,” he said.

Musick, who went back to work Monday, added, “The landing was not really terrible. We got a big jolt but nothing as bad as it looked on TV.” Film footage shows the cartwheeling plane exploding in a fireball and breaking into pieces.

After his section of the big jet came to a stop, Musick said relative calm continued to prevail. “There was still no panic, extreme panic anyway,” he said. Passengers “were in a hurry (to get out) but they weren’t being pushy or shoving like in the horror movies you might see.”

Paul Fast, a television station sales executive in Lexington, Ky., also said he never felt that his life was at risk. A friend assured him that the plane was capable of flying on its two remaining engines, he said.

“I really felt like we’d be OK,” he said. With a few days to reflect on his experience, Fast still seemed relatively untroubled by his close call. But he did mention one concern. “There were a lot of kids on that plane,” he said.

Flying home Sunday, Fast said he had no apprehension until the jet began its landing approach. “When we got ready to land, I clenched my hands,” he said.