It Was A Close Call For These Passengers: How A Near-miss Can Cause Guilt, Flight Anxiety

Toronto crash passenger recounts when Delta plane flipped upside down

"It was just cement and metal, you know." Pete Carlson was on the Delta flight that flipped over while landing in Toronto, injuring 18 people.

• Dr. Michaela Renee Jonnson, a psychotherapist and pilot, says close calls like this can cause near-miss guilt and acute stress disorder.
• Despite the recent crashes, experts emphasize that flying is still a statistically safe mode of transportation.
• Travelers are encouraged to seek support and reevaluate their travel plans based on their comfort levels.

Kim O’Connell was just about to board the Delta regional jet from Minneapolis to Toronto on Monday when he decided to take a later flight. While he normally wouldn’t want to disrupt his travel plans, he gave up his seat since he had the day off work, and the airline was offering $500 dollars to people willing to delay their arrival by a few hours.

Later in the afternoon, when he was in the air, O’Connell connected to Wi-Fi and began receiving messages from coworkers asking if he was OK. Soon, he learned the flight he was supposed to board had crashed in Toronto.

“My heart just sunk,” O'Connell, 29, told USA TODAY. “I thought I was gonna vomit.”

At the time, it wasn’t known whether there were any survivors. O’Connell got up from his seat and told the two other people who volunteered for the later flight what happened at Toronto Pearson Airport. One of them burst into tears, and the other clutched O’Connell’s hand, telling him, “It’s going to be OK, brother.”

Their plane landed in Detroit Monday night, and O’Connell has since been staying with family in Michigan. He plans to return to Minneapolis on Wednesday.

While O’Connell narrowly avoided the crash, that kind of close call can be its own kind of challenge. He is one of a number of flyers whose own travels intersected with the incident, leaving them shaken.

On Monday, Sarah Purser and her 9-year-old son were aboard a plane that was descending toward Toronto Pearson Airport when the Delta flight crashed on a nearby runway.

Purser said she could feel the jet begin rising in altitude before the pilot came on and said the airport was closed and they were being rerouted to Montreal. “We knew it was something serious, but we didn’t know what happened,” she said.

As they headed away from Toronto, Purser and the other passengers hovered over their phones, trying to find out what exactly happened. Then they started seeing pictures of the overturned plane, one of its wings sheared off as passengers climbed out of the cabin.

“It's pretty unbelievable,” Purser, 45, said. “And what's even more unbelievable is that everybody survived.”

The plane sat in Montreal for several hours before landing in Toronto around 10:30 p.m. local time, making their trip from Los Angeles over 12 hours long. Since Monday night, she has been trying to get on a plane to Quebec City so she could see her mother in the hospital.

“I'm dying to get there, but there's pretty much nothing I can do,” she said.

Dr. Michaela Renee Jonnson, a licensed psychotherapist and commercial pilot, said close calls like that can result in near-miss or survivor's guilt.

“It's not exactly survivor's guilt because the people in this aircraft didn't necessarily perish, but the feelings are the same,” she said. Travelers might “question, ‘Well, why didn't I do this? Or what would have happened to me had I done this?’”

While the experience differs from that of the passengers in the crash, being close to or witnessing the aftermath can still cause a fight, flight or freeze response. Travelers could experience acute stress disorder – which “basically puts the brain on hyper-alert for anything similar” – in the six months following the event or post-traumatic stress disorder after the six-month mark.

Hasna Nizamuddin was at Toronto Pearson Airport waiting to fly home to Montreal with her family when another traveler at a lounge told her a plane flipped outside. She and other passengers rushed to the window, where she could just make out the flashing lights of emergency vehicles.

“And that's when it got a little bit stressful,” the 31-year-old said. “I could hear the people around me talking a little bit louder, and then everybody was getting worried about whether or not they're going to make it to their flight or not.”

A ground stop was issued shortly thereafter and her flight was canceled. Nizamuddin had been at the airport for nearly 24 hours, after she, her husband and their two young sons missed their connection on their way back from Turks and Caicos the night before due to a winter storm. Travelers swarmed the Air Canada customer service desk, and she scrambled to make alternate arrangements.

A person’s response to a close call can vary based on their life experiences. “So, somebody who's just kind of coming to the table with a baseline level of anxiety is going to be a lot different than somebody who's actually lived through some sort of grief, loss, trauma that is creating a heightened activation,” Johnson said.

She recommended reaching out to talk to someone “outside of the situation to get some clarity from like a 10,000-foot viewpoint,” whether a friend, family member or mental health care provider, and noted that close calls could be opportunities to reevaluate priorities.

That could include how and whether or not to travel, given spiking flight anxiety in the wake of multiple plane crashes this year.

Nizamuddin rebooked two other flights to Montreal, one of which was canceled. The other flight’s plane “never showed up.” Hotels and trains were booked. “So we felt really stuck,” she said.

Finally, around 8:30 pm, an Enterprise employee helped them find an available car to rent and they drove more than seven hours in the snow to their home in Repentigny. “It was really not a nice feeling to be literally right there, and it could have been your plane that happened to,” she said.

“I think with any fear that we're allowing to kind of drive our life, we have to really consider the risk in terms of safety,” Johnson said. “And it still is an incredibly safe way to travel relative to the one that most people are using every day, which is the car, just based on numbers and the amount of training that goes into it.”

Even so, she added, “I've never been successful at talking someone out of fear rationally. They have to kind of come to that term on their own, and it's really a different level for everybody.”

For his part, O’Connell was rattled in the immediate aftermath. “I'm pretty shaken up from it,” he said. “After almost stepping foot on a plane that ended up crashing, I just want to go back to my wife and be home. But I'm very, very thankful that everyone was safe.”