No matter how much you may try to suppress the thought, it is there in the back of your mind whenever you fly: Am I going to die in a plane crash?
It may be a fleeting thought as you board the plane, when you know there’s no turning back. Or it may make you squirm in your seat the entire trip.
How could we not have these thoughts, given such high-profile crashes as Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 (270 dead), or the flights of TWA 800 in 1996 (230 killed) and EgyptAir 990 (217 dead) last year, both after leaving JFK Airport in New York?
Then, there were Delta Flight 1141 going down while landing at Dallas/Ft. Worth Airport in 1988, and the crash of American Airlines Flight 1420 in Little Rock, Ark.
A plane crash affects our psyches in a novel way; the horror of falling from the sky is something Hollywood has capitalized on for decades.
The most recent example is “Bounce,” the Ben Affleck/Gwyneth Paltrow movie in which a man gives up his seat on a flight that crashes, leaving no survivors. A crash-survival film, Tom Hanks’ “Cast Away,” is one of the holiday season’s biggest hits.
About 40 percent of people in plane crashes in the U.S. survive, mostly because medical facilities and crash response teams here are better prepared to handle crises, says Clint Oster, co-author of “Why Airplanes Crash” and a professor at Indiana University.
As a means of travel, flying is safer than getting in your car or using any other mode of transportation. Professor Arnold Barnett of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has studied airline disasters since 1990, says a passenger faces a 1 in 8 million risk of dying.
“Stated somewhat differently,” Barnett says, “if a passenger facing a death risk of 1 in 8 million were to choose one flight at random each day, that passenger would, on average, go for 21,000 years before perishing in a fatal crash.”
But for those who survive a crash, a minefield of emotions awaits. Survivors often have to overcome physical injuries as well as emotional trauma–guilt, flashbacks, soul-searching.
Just as there is no typical plane crash, survivors face different issues and have different ways of coping. Here are the stories of several plane crash survivors–and what it means to be part of what is called “the most exclusive club in the world.”
Before June 1, 1999, Kristy Sheridan didn’t have to ask strangers to put her kids in a shopping cart at the grocery store or hold them up to a drinking fountain.
She didn’t lose car keys and purses like she does now, didn’t forget to hold her children’s hands in public. She didn’t shop for a family picnic and come back with one package of hot dogs. She didn’t hold her breath when watching a plane take off or land at Dallas/Ft. Worth Airport.
Sheridan balanced a life as a mom and businesswoman. Her job as a regional manager for a contact-lens products company required her to fly often.
That was before American Airlines Flight 1420 crashed while landing in a thunderstorm at Little Rock National Airport, skidding off the runway and hitting a steel structure. The McDonnell Douglas MD-82 was ripped apart by the impact and burst into flames.
Eleven people died, but more than 130 survived, 80 of them with various injuries.
Sheridan suffered a broken vertebra and a broken rib, a concussion, a deeply cut thigh, multiple cuts and bruises, and more than 100 chigger and fire ant bites from lying in the grass and weeds, waiting for help to arrive.
Now, 18 months after the crash, Sheridan still is healing physically and emotionally. She has not returned to work and has “meltdowns,” when she is forgetful. On many nights, she wakes up crying.
She has vowed not to fly again.
She says she feels fragile and suffers from a loss of self-worth. She is dependent on her husband, Brad, to care for her and the children. When the one-time “queen of ball-juggling” fixed a meal for her family several weeks ago, it was a time to rejoice.
She is doing better, Sheridan says, than in the first months after the crash, when she spent hours talking to other survivors and made a seating chart of the MD-82 to determine what happened to each person.
Gradually, Sheridan weaned herself from the daily conversations with fellow passengers, at one point going three months without talking to another survivor.
“I distanced myself for the sake of my sanity and my family’s sanity,” she says. Still, she continues to share a bond with everyone on that flight.
“We speak the mysterious language of twins,” says Sheridan. “I understand the trauma and the dreams … because there were so many walking wounded and we wiped away the tears and the blood, that bonded us closer than anything could.
“We were a family that night.”
Paul J. Verheyden escaped the crash of Delta 1141 at Dallas/Ft. Worth Airport on Aug. 31, 1988, with only a few burns. He attended the funeral of another man from his church who had also been on the flight. It was eerie, he says, almost as if he were going to his own funeral. Then, he began to feel “death proof.”
“I was like, `If I survived this, I can survive anything’ and I became more involved in borderline activities, rebellious activities, things God would not necessarily approve of,” he says.
Verheyden won’t be more specific, but the feeling went on for four years until, knowing he was in trouble, he went to an interdenominational men’s meeting in 1992 and asked for help.
“These guys put their hands on my head, and all the desire to continue those activities was completely erased,” he says. “I felt healed, maybe reborn. No man is an island, and none of us live in a vacuum. I believe He’s healed me from negative things.”
Verheyden is an example for plane crash survivors that time does heal. A study completed by two researchers and presented at the 1999 convention of the American Psychological Association looked at the psychological well-being of 15 people (11 men and four women, ages 31 to 67) who survived plane crashes at least a decade earlier. The control group was eight frequent fliers who had never been in a crash.
“A few weeks to a year or two after a crash, it’s typical to be suffering from post-traumatic stress symptoms,” says researcher Gary Capobianco of Virginia’s Old Dominion University. “But over time the symptoms subsided. Basically these people were perfectly healthy emotionally.
“They scored lower on several standardized measures of emotional distress and had lower levels of anxiety and depression. They were as emotionally stable as people who hadn’t been in a crash, normal and well-adjusted.”
While Verheyden says he thought he was invincible, crash survivors almost always say that their priorities change.
“You don’t ever really get your life back,” says Dennis McCarty of Lewisville, Texas, who was on American’s Flight 1420 to Little Rock and whose right ankle was smashed and tibia broken.
“To work all the time and make all the money in the world is not as important anymore,” McCarty says.
Survivors of small-plane crashes can sound as though they are having an easier time coping, especially if they were piloting the aircraft.
Pilot John MacGuire, who was paralyzed from the waist down in a crash in April 1993 has an air of serenity about him not often observed with survivors of bigger crashes.
MacGuire sounds giddy when describing some of the effects of his crash, despite disability and spending two months in the hospital. He was in the air again six months after the crash–and flew over the spot south of Ft. Worth where the crash occurred during an aerobatics demonstration. Perhaps he was looking for closure or for a reaffirmation of the decision he made on that eventful day.
“From a pilot’s perspective, the crash was a test,” he says. “Would I do what I had trained for and not screw up? And I passed the test. I know I did everything humanly possible to make it turn out right. I’ve proven that I can handle an emergency.
“When I looked at where I crashed, I said: `I’m supposed to feel something, but if I get wrapped up in emotions, it’ll distract me and that isn’t important to me. I just don’t want to crash there again.’ It’s a landmark in life.”
MacGuire acts with more self-assurance. He says he has become intolerant of those who impose on him, but more appreciative of the things we take for granted.
“If someone asks me to do something dumb, I just laugh and say, `I’m not going to do that,”‘ he says. “I don’t have patience for negative people. I’ll call a woman I’m dating and tell her to look out the window–at the sunset, or if there’s a double rainbow after a thunderstorm I’ll call up my friends and say, `Hey, look at that.’ I stop and look and reset my pain button.”
Dr. Gerrard Jacobs, a professor of psychology and director of the Disaster Mental Health Institute at the University of South Dakota, says he is not surprised by MacGuire’s response.
A commercial jet crash, Jacobs says, “may be more difficult to cope with for several reasons. It’s less of an individual experience. There is more sharing of trauma, your own trauma and that of the people around you.
“It’s the visual impact of the trauma, not just your experience of your world,” Jacobs says. “Everything surrounding more incidents is more intense.”
As a pilot, MacGuire was more in control than passengers on large jets. He had a hand in trying to save his life; he wasn’t helplessly strapped into his seat.
A recent study of crash survivors confirms this. “The people who felt they had some control had lower levels of anxiety than other survivors,” says researcher Capobianco.
