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This was published 6 years ago
'It was so loud and dark': Georgia recalls horror of Flight 811
By Jenny Noyes
Six-year-old Georgia Hotz was asleep when it happened. The first thing she remembers after the 1.52am take-off was waking up – half an hour later – with a blanket covering her head. Her parents had placed it there in a feeble effort to protect her.
As she peeled it away, she took in a scene from most people’s worst nightmares.
Paul and Susan Hotz and their daughter Georgia Meyerson with a copy of a story from 1989 detailing their miraculous escape.Credit: Cole Bennetts
Georgia was on United Airlines flight 811 from Honolulu to Sydney on February 24, 1989, with her parents Paul and Susan. As the plane climbed to cruising altitude, the locks on its cargo door failed, blowing it open with such force it smashed a massive hole, 10 metres across, in the fuselage.
Nine passengers sitting in the downstairs business class section near the Hotz family were sucked out of the plane to their deaths. The overhead lockers were also pulled from the plane. The cabin plunged into darkness.
When she lifted the blanket, Georgia saw that she and her parents were just metres from the gaping hole. “It was so loud and so dark, there was a lot of pressure, and all of this white debris flying around the air ... like thousands of white moths.”
As her father fumbled with their lifejackets, she looked down and saw a woman’s bloodied face beneath his legs. An air hostess had been badly injured by her flying drinks trolley, and was lying unconscious on the floor near the hole, the pressure slowly pushing her towards it.
Paul had managed to pull her to safety and was using his legs to pin her in place. Asked how he did it, he simply says, “I do not know. Nobody does.”
The woman who’d been sharing an armrest with Susan was gone.
Susan Hotz lands in Sydney after United Airlines Flight 811 in 1989.
The oxygen had left the cabin with the overhead lockers and missing passengers, and breathing was difficult. Two engines were on fire, one was later found to have body parts inside. The pilot took the plane into rapid descent. Georgia’s eardrums burst.
None of them thought they had a chance of surviving. For about 20 agonising minutes, they clung to their seats and each other, and waited to die.
Air accidents are extremely rare; and those involving people being “sucked out” are even rarer. Still, the idea of it is so horrifying to many travellers they’ll avoid window seats and exit rows.
Passengers on United Airlines Flight 811 brace themselves for landing.Credit: AP
Earlier this month, one such incident made headlines around the world. An engine exploded on a Southwest Airlines flight from New York to Dallas, sending shrapnel smashing into a window.
Jennifer Riordan, a bank executive and mother-of-two, was sucked halfway out the hole. Despite the heroic efforts of passengers, she died of blunt-force trauma to her head and torso.
For the Hotz family, of Sydney's north, hearing about incidents like this opens up the almost three-decades-old wounds, bringing the memories of their own horror flight flooding back.
In terms of traumatic events, what they lived through is “one of the worst-case scenarios you could possibly come across”, says Michael Burge, director of the Australian College of Trauma Treatment.
In his view, the psychological treatment offered in the wake of air accidents, even these days, is “a joke”.
So far, one passenger who survived the recent Southwest incident is suing the airline for psychological damage. But under a current international agreement, passengers are not entitled to claim compensation for psychological injury resulting from an air accident unless they can prove it was caused by physical injuries.
Mr Burge says that’s ridiculous.
“It’s absurd. All the various groups who suffer from post-traumatic stress - ADF personnel, police, victims of crime - they all recognise the need to address mental health issues after such traumatic events. It’s out of step with civilised society.”
Back in 1989, the Hotz family were offered one session with United Airlines' own counsellor for a debrief. Susan says it “was not sufficient for our state of mind and psychological needs at the time. We were all very fragile.”
The United Airlines jet with the hole blown out in 1989.
For Georgia, now 34, a theatre nurse at Sydney's St Vincent’s Hospital, and married with a five-year-old son, the recovery process has been lifelong. Seeing her father in shock and unresponsive on the tarmac is “something I’ll never forget”, she says, gasping at the memory.
Having seen her parents so vulnerable under such horrific circumstances, she felt she had to protect them. She couldn’t sleep, and couldn’t be away from them.
When her son was born, the trauma returned in the form of post-natal depression. “I thought I had dealt with it, and then you bring a child into the world and all of a sudden … it came out again. That fear. Because of him, I feared.
“I had to do a lot of work. There was a lot of damage, and people don't see that side of it.”
- Air accident