UNITED AIRLINES FLIGHT 811 : Flight Safety Expert's Get-Away Trip Becomes Arena of Horror (2024)

Attorney Bruce Lampert had been working marathon hours representing victims of the crash of a Continental jetliner ever since the jet went down in December, 1987, just outside Denver. Now he was tired, so he signed up for a trip to New Zealand and Australia--aboard United Flight 811.

It was a trip that would take him from his home in Denver to Los Angeles and Honolulu and finally to leisurely days of diving on the Great Barrier Reef.

“I was doing it to get away from all of it,” Lampert, 40, said Friday in a telephone interview from his Honolulu hotel room. “It’s ironic. I just wanted time off away from airplanes and these airplane crashes before I start work on the next one.”

Only Lampert, himself a seasoned private pilot and one-time U.S. Navy air intelligence officer, picked the wrong flight.

High Above the Pacific

On Friday morning, the huge Boeing 747, with Lampert and 354 others aboard, turned into what he called an arena of “horror” high above the Pacific Ocean.

Sitting in seat 7B on the left side of the jetliner’s upper deck, Lampert said a sudden “explosive decompression of the plane” occurred about 20 minutes out of Honolulu. The force was strong enough to split the upper cabin’s inner walls, to blow out windows and to collapse overhead panels and the aircraft’s rear bulkhead.

It opened a huge hole on the plane’s right side, a gaping opening that “stopped right under the upper deck, and so the upper deck floor held and that’s what saved me,” he said in a telephone interview.

Across from him, he watched two couples fighting the gusts that threatened to pull them through two windows that had burst beside them.

“The wives were sitting next to the blown-out windows,” Lampert said. “Both husbands just grabbed their wives, held them, pulled them as far away from the windows as possible. I’ve never seen such looks of terror. . . . The women were being held by their husbands for dear life. It was like a hug of death.”

For Lampert and others in the filled-to-capacity top compartment, there was incredible noise to contend with and a constant wind-strewn rush of debris. It was almost, he said, “like airborne fiberglass” hitting them. Flight attendants, trying to give instructions to the passengers, shouted to be heard about the din, but it was useless.

“They had to do everything by hand signals,” Lampert said. “It was like a pantomime . . . a pantomime of horror.” Even worse, there was the uncertainty. Was this a bomb blast? And would they survive whatever it was?

“The horror of it was we didn’t know from second to second if the remaining skin on the airplane was going to hold or not,” Lampert said. “I don’t know how long the feeling lasted. I lost my watch. It just disappeared.”

Lampert said he figures it took the pilot about 20 minutes to navigate the crippled aircraft back to Honolulu and land it. “It must have been about as long as it took to get out, it just seemed much longer,” he explained.

“Passengers on the right side of the plane kept watching as minute by minute passed by. Finally, they started screaming, ‘Land! Land! Land!’ It was like a physical wave of relief.

“We had all been thinking Lockerbie (the site of last December’s terrorist-caused air crash in which 270 people died), but when we saw land, we started clapping. You couldn’t hear the sounds and so everyone grinned and flashed thumbs up. We knew we were going to make it.”

It was only when the aircraft landed that the passengers found out not everyone had made it.

And it was only when he looked at the aircraft that Lampert knew for certain this wasn’t like Lockerbie at all.

“The blowout was too regular in shape to be an explosion,” he explained. “It was almost congruent with the starboard cargo door. . . . My feeling is it was a failure in the cargo door itself.”

Like the other surviving passengers, Lampert made his way out of the aircraft by sliding down an emergency chute.

Allowed to wander on the Tarmac for almost an hour, he had plenty of time to talk to other passengers, including the man sitting behind seat 9E who “blinked his eyes and saw three rows were gone.”

“It makes you realize how arbitrary these things are,” Lampert mused. “What makes one person sit in 9F and another in 7B? It’s the luck of the draw.”

For now, Lampert hasn’t decided if he’s willing to press his luck by going on with the trip. “I’m going to sleep on it,” he said. “I’m not in any condition to make any decisions.

“Mostly, what I feel now is a greater resolve. . . . I’ve been doing this work for 10 years, with the main idea of improving air safety both as an attorney and as an advocate.

“Now I’m a victim, too. My resolve has twice doubled.”