In-Air Emergencies Can Cause Lasting Trauma

Last January, Shandy Brewer boarded an Alaska Airlines flight from Portland, Ore., to Ontario, Calif., en route to her grandmother’s birthday celebration. She was seated in the 11th row, between her father and a stranger. Shortly after takeoff, Ms. Brewer and the other passengers heard a loud bang. She couldn’t see that 15 rows behind her one of the plane’s doors had blown off, exposing passengers to open air at 16,000 feet.

Oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling, and passengers began to pray. She thought they were going to crash. As the plane made an emergency landing in Oregon, Ms. Brewer hugged her father with one arm and the stranger with the other, wishing she could record a video to say goodbye to her mother.

Nearly 11 months on, the mental distress caused by less than 20 minutes of panic in the air is its own form of injury, said Ms. Brewer, now 30: “People say, ‘Nobody died on this flight’ — but we could have.” Ms. Brewer sees a therapist and practices breathing exercises, but she still has an occasional recurring nightmare about being on a helicopter without doors or a frame, clutching her seat to save herself from barreling into the sky. She’s also set off by loud noises. On the Fourth of July, the sound of fireworks made her feel “extreme panic,” and she had to hide indoors.

“There’s a cloud over me all the time reminding me that I could die at any second,” she said.

When people discuss fears of flying, they’re often reminded that planes are quite safe. According to a 2022 analysis of commercial aviation safety conducted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, “There has been a significant and sustained reduction in airline accidents in the United States over the past two decades.” The analysis found that flight safety had “improved more than forty-fold.”

But statistics matter little to a mind that can’t stop replaying an upsetting event, especially when startling emergencies continue to make the news. “A lot of people develop significant anxiety after these incidents,” said Rebecca B. Skolnick, a clinical psychologist and adjunct assistant clinical professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “It becomes not just something that happened to them, but something that shapes the way they think about the world, and flying in particular,” she said.

Ms. Brewer and more than 30 other passengers from the Alaska Airlines flight are suing the carrier and Boeing, the aircraft manufacturer, citing “severe stress, anxiety, trauma, physical pain, flashbacks and fear of flying and also objective physical manifestations such as sleeplessness, PTSD, hearing damage and other injuries.” According to the lawsuit, one of the plaintiffs wrote a text to their mother, believing, like Ms. Brewer, that the plane was crashing: “We’re in masks. I love you.”