Survivors of past air disasters offer support after Toronto crash
CONCORD: Sad. Happy. Anguished. Guilty.
Denise Lockie of Charlotte, North Carolina, has felt all of the above in recent weeks, as a string of major aviation accidents brought back memories of crash-landing in an icy river in New York. Sixteen years after the 'Miracle on the Hudson,' she and other aviation disaster survivors stand ready to support those who are just emerging from their ordeal in Toronto on Monday.
'Right now, they haven't even processed what has happened,' Lockie said of the 80 passengers and crew members who survived when Delta Air Lines flight 4819 crashed and flipped over at Pearson International Airport.
There were no survivors when a commercial jetliner and an Army helicopter collided in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 29, a medical transportation plane crashed in Philadelphia on Jan. 31 and a plane carrying 10 people crashed in Alaska on Feb. 6. But in Toronto, not only did no one die, the last of the injured were released from the hospital Thursday.
'It's amazing,' said passenger Peter Carlson, who spoke at a conference less than 48 hours after the crash. Though he managed to crack a joke — 'Nothing beats a good road trip besides an airplane crash' — he later admitted struggling to leave his hotel room.
'I was quite emotional about this whole thing and just really want to be home,' said Carlson, the newest member of what retired flight attendant Sandy Purl calls a 'sad sorority and fraternity.'
A history of survival
Monday's crash in Toronto wasn't the first time lives were spared during a major aviation disaster there: In 2005, all 309 people on board Air France Flight 358 survived after it overran the runway and burst into flames.
In 1989, 184 of the 296 people aboard United Airlines Flight 232 survived a crash in Sioux City, Iowa. And in 1977, Purl was one of 22 survivors when Southern Airways Flight 242 lost both engines in a hailstorm and crashed in New Hope, Georgia. Sixty-three people aboard the plane died, along with nine on the ground.
'Immediately you have a euphoria because you survived,' said Purl, now 72. 'But then you go into what's known as psychic numbing, which protects you from everything that's in your brain that you can't bring to the surface for a long time down the road, if ever.'
For more than a year after the crash, Purl's strategy was to flee whenever anyone mentioned the disaster. Eventually she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital where she told the staff, 'I can't stop crying.'
A kindly doctor took her hand and reassured her what she was feeling was real.
'For the first time, a year and a half later, people weren't saying, 'You look so good! Get on with your life, you're so lucky to be alive,'' she said. 'For the first time, someone gave me permission to feel and to cry and to feel safe.'
Survivors stick together
Both Purl and Lockie are members of the National Air Disaster Alliance, which was created in 1995 to support survivors and victims' families and advocate for safety improvements.
In 2009, the group published an open letter to the 155 passengers and crew members of US Airways flight 1549 after Captain Chesley 'Sully' Sullenberger famously landed the plane in the Hudson River after a bird strike disabled both engines.
'We are grateful and thankful that all survived, but survivors need time to process and comprehend what it means to be an air crash survivor,' the group wrote, encouraging survivors to rest, retreat, rely on others and reserve their rights to privacy.
Paying it forward, Lockie is offering similar advice to those aboard the Toronto flight. She described being in a fog for about eight weeks after her crash, struggling to keep up with her corporate job as her injuries healed and being beset by nightmares and panic attacks.
'Absolutely number one as far as I'm concerned is taking to somebody who can understand,' she said. 'I think Delta is a fantastic airline and I'm sure their care team is fantastic, but then again, how many people on those care teams have actually been involved in an aviation incident?'
Friends and family might urge survivors to move on with their lives, she said, but 'it just doesn't work that way.'
'You might have fears that come out later on, and you really have to be able to deal with those,' she said. 'So my recommendation is to take all the help you can possibly take.'
It doesn't take much to trigger memories
While Lockie said her experience hasn't deterred her from flying often, it has shaped her behavior in other ways. When she enters a store or restaurant, for example, she always checks for the fastest way out.
'You have to be able to calm yourself if there's something that triggers your emotional aptitude,' she said.
Purl, who returned to work as a flight attendant four years after the crash, said she can be triggered by the smell of gasoline or seeing news footage of other crashes.
'I look at the TV and I see my crash,' she said. 'I smell it. I taste it. I see the black smoke and I can't get through it. I feel the heat of the fire.'
The Toronto survivors may find their experience exacerbates underlying traumas, she said.
'Like the layers of an onion, you pull one back and there's another layer underneath,' she said.
Her advice: Live one day at a time, seek out people who offer unconditional love and talk, talk, talk.
'And then find a way to make a difference as a result,' she said.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Al Arabiya
09-05-2025
- Al Arabiya
Military helicopter plunges into reservoir in Sri Lanka, killing 5
A military helicopter plunged into a reservoir in Sri Lanka on Friday, killing five people. Air force spokesperson Eranda Geeganage said the helicopter was carrying 12 people from the army and air force to a military pass out event when it plunged into a reservoir in Maduru Oya, some 280 kilometers (175 miles) northeast of the capital Colombo. All the passengers were recovered alive, but three army personnel and two from the air force died later in a hospital, Geeganage said. The reason for the crash was not immediately known.
Arab News
20-04-2025
- Arab News
250 years after America went to war for independence, a divided nation battles over its legacy
LEXINGTON, Mass.: Tens of thousands of people came to Lexington, Massachusetts, just before dawn on Saturday to witness a reenactment of how the American Revolution began 250 years ago, with the blast of gunshot and a trail of colonial flair. Starting with Saturday's anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the country will look back to its war of independence and ask where its legacy stands today. Just after dawn on the Lexington Battle Green, militiamen, muskets in hand, took on a much larger contingent of British regulars. The battle ended with eight Americans killed and 10 wounded — the dead scattered on the grounds as the British marched off. The regulars would head to Concord but not before a horseman, Dr. Samuel Prescott, rode toward the North Bridge and warned communities along the way that the British were coming. A lone horseman reenacted that ride Saturday, followed by a parade through town and a ceremony at the bridge. The day offers an opportunity to reflect on this seminal moment in history but also consider what this fight means today. Organizers estimated that over 100,000 came out for events in the two towns Saturday. 'It's truly momentous,' said Richard Howell, who portrayed Lexington Minute Man Samuel Tidd in the battle. 'This is one of the most sacred pieces of ground in the country, if not the world, because of what it represents,' he said. 'To represent what went on that day, how a small town of Lexington was a vortex of so much.' Among those watching the Lexington reenactment was Brandon Mace, a lieutenant colonel with the Army Reserve whose ancestor Moses Stone was in the Lexington militia. He said watching the reenactment was 'a little emotional.' 'He made the choice just like I made and my brother made, and my son is in the Army as well,' Mace said. .'.. He did not know we would be celebrating him today. He did not know that he was participating in the birth of the nation. He just knew his friends and family were in danger.' The 250th anniversary comes with President Donald Trump, scholars and others divided over whether to have a yearlong party leading up to July 4, 2026, as Trump has called for, or to balance any celebrations with questions about women, the enslaved and Indigenous people and what their stories reveal. What happened at Lexington and Concord? Historians can confidently tell us that hundreds of British troops marched from Boston in the early morning of April 19, 1775, and gathered about 14 miles (23 kilometers) northwest, on Lexington's town green. Witnesses remembered some British officers yelled, 'Throw down your arms, ye villains, ye rebels!' and that a shot was heard amid the chaos, followed by 'scattered fire' from the British. The battle turned so fierce that the area reeked of burning powder. By day's end, the fighting had moved to about 7 miles (11 kilometers) west to Concord and some 250 British and 95 colonizts were killed or wounded. But no one knows who fired first, or why. And the revolt itself was initially less a revolution than a demand for better terms. Woody Holton, a professor of early American history at the University of South Carolina, said most scholars agree that the rebels of April 1775 weren't looking to leave the empire, but to repair their relationship with King George III and go back to the days before the Stamp Act, the Tea Act and other disputes of the previous decade. 'The colonizts only wanted to turn back the clock to 1763,' he said. Stacy Schiff, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian whose books include biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Adams, said Lexington and Concord 'galvanized opinion precisely as the Massachusetts men hoped it would, though still it would be a long road to a vote for independence, which Adams felt should have been declared on 20 April 1775.' But at the time, Schiff added, 'It did not seem possible that a mother country and her colony had actually come to blows.' A fight for the ages The rebels already believed their cause was bigger than a disagreement between subjects and rulers. Well before the turning points of 1776 — before the Declaration of Independence or Thomas Paine's boast that 'We have it in our power to begin the world over again' — they cast themselves in a drama for the ages. The so-called Suffolk Resolves of 1774, drafted by civic leaders of Suffolk County, Massachusetts, prayed for a life 'unfettered by power, unclogged with shackles,' a fight that would determine the 'fate of this new world, and of unborn millions.' The revolution was an ongoing story of surprise and improvization. Military historian Rick Atkinson, whose book 'The Fate of the Day' is the second of a planned trilogy on the war, called Lexington and Concord 'a clear win for the home team,' if only because the British hadn't expected such impassioned resistance from the colony's militia. The British, ever underestimating those whom King George regarded as a 'deluded and unhappy multitude,' would be knocked back again when the rebels promptly framed and transmitted a narrative blaming the royal forces. 'Once shots were fired in Lexington, Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren did all in their power to collect statements from witnesses and to circulate them quickly; it was essential that the colonies, and the world, understand who had fired first,' Schiff said. 'Adams was convinced that the Lexington skirmish would be 'famed in the history of this country.' He knocked himself out to make clear who the aggressors had been.' A country still in progress Neither side imagined a war lasting eight years, or had confidence in what kind of country would be born out of it. The founders united in their quest for self-government but differed how to actually govern, and whether self-government could even last. Americans have never stopped debating the balance of powers, the rules of enfranchisement or how widely to apply the exhortation, 'All men are created equal.' That debate was very much on display Saturday — though mostly on the fringes and with anti-Trump protesters far outnumbered by flag-waving tourists, locals and history buffs. Many protesters carried signs inspired by the American Revolution including, 'Resist Like Its 1775,' and one even brought a puppet featuring an orange-faced Trump. 'It's a very appropriate place and date to make it clear that, as Americans, we want to take a stand against what we think is an encroaching autocracy,' Glenn Stark, a retired physics professor who was holding a 'No Kings' sign and watching the ceremony at the North Bridge. Massachusetts' Democratic governor, Maura Healey, who spoke at the North Bridge ceremony, also used the event to remind the cheering crowd that many of the ideals fought for during the Revolutionary War are again at risk. 'We see things that would be familiar to our Revolutionary predecessors — the silencing of critics, the disappearing people from our streets, demands for unquestioned fealty,' she said. 'Due process is a foundational right. if it can be discarded for one, it can be lost for all.'
Arab News
21-02-2025
- Arab News
Survivors of past air disasters offer support after Toronto crash
CONCORD: Sad. Happy. Anguished. Guilty. Denise Lockie of Charlotte, North Carolina, has felt all of the above in recent weeks, as a string of major aviation accidents brought back memories of crash-landing in an icy river in New York. Sixteen years after the 'Miracle on the Hudson,' she and other aviation disaster survivors stand ready to support those who are just emerging from their ordeal in Toronto on Monday. 'Right now, they haven't even processed what has happened,' Lockie said of the 80 passengers and crew members who survived when Delta Air Lines flight 4819 crashed and flipped over at Pearson International Airport. There were no survivors when a commercial jetliner and an Army helicopter collided in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 29, a medical transportation plane crashed in Philadelphia on Jan. 31 and a plane carrying 10 people crashed in Alaska on Feb. 6. But in Toronto, not only did no one die, the last of the injured were released from the hospital Thursday. 'It's amazing,' said passenger Peter Carlson, who spoke at a conference less than 48 hours after the crash. Though he managed to crack a joke — 'Nothing beats a good road trip besides an airplane crash' — he later admitted struggling to leave his hotel room. 'I was quite emotional about this whole thing and just really want to be home,' said Carlson, the newest member of what retired flight attendant Sandy Purl calls a 'sad sorority and fraternity.' A history of survival Monday's crash in Toronto wasn't the first time lives were spared during a major aviation disaster there: In 2005, all 309 people on board Air France Flight 358 survived after it overran the runway and burst into flames. In 1989, 184 of the 296 people aboard United Airlines Flight 232 survived a crash in Sioux City, Iowa. And in 1977, Purl was one of 22 survivors when Southern Airways Flight 242 lost both engines in a hailstorm and crashed in New Hope, Georgia. Sixty-three people aboard the plane died, along with nine on the ground. 'Immediately you have a euphoria because you survived,' said Purl, now 72. 'But then you go into what's known as psychic numbing, which protects you from everything that's in your brain that you can't bring to the surface for a long time down the road, if ever.' For more than a year after the crash, Purl's strategy was to flee whenever anyone mentioned the disaster. Eventually she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital where she told the staff, 'I can't stop crying.' A kindly doctor took her hand and reassured her what she was feeling was real. 'For the first time, a year and a half later, people weren't saying, 'You look so good! Get on with your life, you're so lucky to be alive,'' she said. 'For the first time, someone gave me permission to feel and to cry and to feel safe.' Survivors stick together Both Purl and Lockie are members of the National Air Disaster Alliance, which was created in 1995 to support survivors and victims' families and advocate for safety improvements. In 2009, the group published an open letter to the 155 passengers and crew members of US Airways flight 1549 after Captain Chesley 'Sully' Sullenberger famously landed the plane in the Hudson River after a bird strike disabled both engines. 'We are grateful and thankful that all survived, but survivors need time to process and comprehend what it means to be an air crash survivor,' the group wrote, encouraging survivors to rest, retreat, rely on others and reserve their rights to privacy. Paying it forward, Lockie is offering similar advice to those aboard the Toronto flight. She described being in a fog for about eight weeks after her crash, struggling to keep up with her corporate job as her injuries healed and being beset by nightmares and panic attacks. 'Absolutely number one as far as I'm concerned is taking to somebody who can understand,' she said. 'I think Delta is a fantastic airline and I'm sure their care team is fantastic, but then again, how many people on those care teams have actually been involved in an aviation incident?' Friends and family might urge survivors to move on with their lives, she said, but 'it just doesn't work that way.' 'You might have fears that come out later on, and you really have to be able to deal with those,' she said. 'So my recommendation is to take all the help you can possibly take.' It doesn't take much to trigger memories While Lockie said her experience hasn't deterred her from flying often, it has shaped her behavior in other ways. When she enters a store or restaurant, for example, she always checks for the fastest way out. 'You have to be able to calm yourself if there's something that triggers your emotional aptitude,' she said. Purl, who returned to work as a flight attendant four years after the crash, said she can be triggered by the smell of gasoline or seeing news footage of other crashes. 'I look at the TV and I see my crash,' she said. 'I smell it. I taste it. I see the black smoke and I can't get through it. I feel the heat of the fire.' The Toronto survivors may find their experience exacerbates underlying traumas, she said. 'Like the layers of an onion, you pull one back and there's another layer underneath,' she said. Her advice: Live one day at a time, seek out people who offer unconditional love and talk, talk, talk. 'And then find a way to make a difference as a result,' she said.
