Buckling up his safety belt in seat 8B aboard United Airlines (UAL) Flight 811, Bruce Lampert had no clue he was on the verge of a horrific busman’s holiday.
Then a father of one, he had clocked up so many air miles working as an aviation lawyer specialising in airplane crash litigation, that he had decided to embark on a three-week holiday to Australia and New Zealand.
‘I was just looking forward to getting away from law, airplane and accidents and lying on a beach,’ Bruce tells Metro over Zoom from his home in Denver, Colorado. ‘But I literally flew into the next accident.’
Twenty minutes into the second leg from Honolulu, Bruce was jolted by a violent bang.
Immediately, everything in the aircraft that wasn’t tied down began flying around.
‘The roar was as if you were laying down on a railroad track, and you had a train run over the top of you. It was so loud you couldn’t even hear yourself,’ the 78-year-old remembers.
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Bruce understood that there had been an explosive decompression in the Boeing 747 – an extremely rapid loss of cabin pressure – and oxygen masks fell from above.
‘I looked over and one of the windows had been blown completely out.’
But the damage was far greater on the deck below him, where a door had been ripped from the plane, leaving a truck-sized hole in the business-class section of the two-floor jumbo jet.
He later learned that the force of the decompression had ripped seats from the plane, carrying eight strapped-in passengers to their deaths.
A ninth passenger had attempted to get away, but as soon as they unbuckled the safety belt they were sucked out.
Bruce ducked down to protect himself from a violent airflow of fine dust that clogged his eyes, nose and mouth and from the papers, magazines and cups that were flying around.
Passengers clung on for dear life as glasses and jewellery were torn from their bodies.
‘I looked to my right, and I saw a husband and wife leaning away from the hole on the window. The man was clutching his wife’s hand so hard that he was literally white-knuckled.
‘The flight attendant who was seated up front, was strapped in with an upper torso restraint, facing us, looking back toward us. Her eyes were as big as saucers – she was obviously terrified.’
Bruce watched helplessly as his fellow passengers sat in abject terror. ‘The panels on the wall literally blew off. The chandelier that was hanging over the circular staircase got ripped out of the overhead,’ he recalls of the flight in February 1989.
Remembering Pan Am Flight 103 the previous year, where a bomb had detonated on a plane over Lockerbie, Scotland, Bruce assumed there had been a terror attack.
‘Your brain will not let you deal with something you cannot handle, and so it denies you the fact that it is happening,’ he adds. ‘I could see it, I could hear it, I could smell it, but my mind wouldn’t let me accept it.’
But reality hit when, looking out of the window, Bruce saw two engines on fire.
It was a horrific 24-minute ordeal that saw many passengers try to make peace with their deaths. Bruce could feel the plane descending, but he didn’t know if it was a controlled landing or a catastrophic fall from the sky.
He thought of his son Seth, who was anxious about Bruce’s frequent air travel, and wished he’d hugged him one last time.
Bizarrely, he also remembers thinking about his snorkel, mask and fins, packed into his carry-on, wondering briefly whether to get them out in case they ditched in the sea.
‘It would be comical if it wasn’t so serious,’ Bruce says. Besides, he adds, there is no such thing as a jumbo jet safely landing on the ocean. ‘That would be a crash. Water is just as hard as concrete when you hit it.’
Bruce, who was a pilot, thought of all the things that could be done in a flight emergency but were unavailable to him now.
‘The problem with being on a commercial airliner is there’s nothing to do.You can’t run because there’s no place to run to. You can’t scream because nobody can hear you. You have to sit there with your hands in your lap and trust the people up front.’
Which is why he is so grateful to Captain David Cronin, who made a 180-degree turn back to Honolulu and a miraculous landing in the stricken plane.
Once safely on land, the plane erupted in cheers, applause and embraces. The slides were deployed and the survivors made their way out as quickly as they could.
‘I later learned it was his second to last flight before he had to retire,’ says Bruce.
As he walked around the aircraft, he saw the devastation for the first time.
‘I saw from the outside the massive hole, 10 by 20 feet, where the passengers had been blown to their deaths, and at that point I felt like I was sinking into ice cold water,’ recalls Bruce.
‘I was in total shock. I could not believe that an airplane with a gaping black hole in the right hand side could fly. If the door had hit the tail, there would have been 250 deaths.’
After continuing on to Australia, Bruce met the family of one of those who had died.
‘I ended up sitting in the living room of a husband and wife that that lost their child, talking to them about the accident, and it turned into a workman’s holiday instead.’
When he ended up representing passengers in lawsuits against United and the Boeing aircraft company, Bruce discovered the accident could have been prevented.
‘I was angry. They were gambling with our lives, and I threw myself in the representation of my clients against the people that could have prevented this accident.
‘It was therapeutic for me to to force my emotions, toward a positive result.’
In the aftermath, dozens of lawsuits were brought against United Airlines and Boeing by passengers, crew and families of those killed, with the cases consolidated in a California federal court.
The complex litigation examined liability and compensation for the victims, with many claims ultimately resolved individually, including through confidential settlements.
For Bruce, there was one silver lining. He fell in love with the court reporter recording the case, and 35 years ago they married and went on to have three children.
‘I look at Cherilyn as being one of the good things that came out of the horrific United 11 experience,’ he says.
Busy as ever today, Bruce is still practicing law as partner at Katzman, Lampert & Stoll and flying all over the world. But he always books a ticket near the exits over the wings, which provide the quickest route to evacuation.
‘Sometimes flying can trigger the memories of that day, such as a sudden jolt or a dip,or a climb or a descent. But I’m an aviation lawyer, I’ve go to fly to planes crashes all over the world. So it’s something I just have to accept.
‘However, I do think it makes me a lot more empathetic toward my clients when they tell me about what happened in a turbulence event, or they talk about what happened when an engine caught on fire.
‘In one of the cases that I tried, after the trial was over, one of the jurorscame to me and they said, “Mr. Lampert, that closing argument – it was almost like you were there.”
‘I didn’t tell him that I was because I had been.’