Facing the Fear of Flying

Flight attendants cope with the trauma of fatal disasters

When a Southern Airways DC-9 crashed in rain and hail near New Hope, Ga., in 1977, Flight Attendant Sandy Purl was not among the 70 dead. But she came to wish she had been. Hospitalized and sedated for shock, Purl would leap from her bed each night shouting, "Grab your ankles!" and try to force other patients into the classic precrash body position. A year later, she was still overcome with guilt that she had survived and her passengers died. One recurrent fantasy was that her arms and legs were gone. Says Purl: "I thought maybe if I had no legs or arms, I would be a victim of the crash and that would be O.K. I looked into the mirror one morning and beat it to splinters because I looked so good. My husband was absolutely supportive, but I divorced him. I woke up a year later and thought, 'My God, what have I done?' "

Purl is an example of postcrash syndrome among airline personnel: a deep trauma that combines survivor guilt, depression, rage and an array of physical symptoms ranging from digestive problems and hypertension to sleeplessness and heart ailments. Some survivors develop phobias or panic when they hear sounds that remind them of the crash, and many are so worn out by the continuing anguish that they say they are simply too tired to make even minor decisions about their lives. Says Psychiatric Sociologist Margaret Barbeau of Glendale, Calif.: "You can walk away from an accident without physical injury, but the emotional injury may be even worse. You can't X-ray it, but the injuries are real."

Barbeau devotes much of her practice to treating airline personnel and families of the dead after fatal plane crashes. Hired by the Association of Flight Attendants, she conducts group sessions and keeps a phone line open night and day for troubled survivors. Reason: the victim's obsessive need to talk about the ordeal is part of the healing process. Says Barbeau: "The unburdening must go on, over and over again."

The first reaction of the survivor, says Barbeau, is "psychic numbing," a defense mechanism that keeps him or her functioning. Then the full horror of the crash pokes through, fades again, and gradually comes to overwhelm the victim. Like many flight attendants, Arlene Feroe, who survived an Alaska Airlines accident, ran around the hospital for days apologizing to injured passengers. Another attendant drove his automobile into a tree during a hallucination; he "saw" a colleague who died in a plane crash sitting beside him in the car.

Barbeau's aim is to convert guilt and depression into rage and tears--to get the emotion out so that healing may begin.

Justly or not, the first wave of rage is usually directed at the airline for not doing more to prevent crashes. Says Sandy Clay, a survivor of the United crash at Portland, Ore., last December: "I wanted to blow up the airline. I tried to run over an executive of the company after they forced me to take sick leave and workmen's compensation." Some would like to get back to work, but feel they are treated like pariahs. Others are terrified about flying again, and shocked that employers ignore the effects of trauma and want them right back at work. Says Lannie Chevalier, who survived two fatal helicopter crashes: "They felt there wouldn't be any problem if only I jumped right back on a plane.

Their attitude was, The pilots have gone back to flying, so why can't you?' " In fact, says Clinical Psychologist Dan Johnson, the healing process is often slow; psychological symptoms may still be increasing a year or more after the accident.

Johnson and Barbeau are working with Western Air Lines flight attendants in the wake of the Mexico City crash last month. It marks the first time that grief counseling has been requested by an airline. Says Western Vice President Larry Lee: "We had a very heavy grief situation.Many had just graduated after seven weeks of training with some of the victims.They become so close in these classes."

Johnson and Barbeau met with relatives and colleagues of the victims. They also gave a quick course in grief counseling to senior Western employees, each of whom was assigned to help the family of one of the victims deal with their grief.

The problem in the past, says Johnson, is that when executives are responsible for coping with the grief of employees, they become so involved and work so hard that they develop the same symptoms as the grief victims themselves.

Barbeau, who counseled relatives and colleagues of the dead after two air disasters that left no survivors--the 1978 San Diego crash of a 727 and the DC-10 crash in Chicago last May--says the shock resulting from these crashes was more widespread than usual I among airline employees. Reason: the outside observer always wards off fears of death by identifying with the survivor; with no survivors, those fears are harder to disperse.

"The San Diego and Chicago crashes really helped focus attention on the fears of aircraft personnel," says Barbeau. "It's slowly getting to be O.K. now to talk about fear of flying among flight attendants and the general public as well. People who have gone through something like this are not the same afterward."

Still, most try to get back on the track. Two and a half years after her crash, Sandy Purl has gone back to work as a flight attendant with Republic Airlines. "Maybe it won't work and I'll wind up working at McDonald's," she says. "I'm hurt I'm sad. But I'm putting my puzzle together, and I will go forward."

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