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It’s been nearly 13 years since Air Transat flight 236 from Toronto crash landed on a small island in the Azores after running out of fuel over the Atlantic Ocean. All 306 passengers and crew survived the near disaster, including Margaret McKinnon — who is now a psychologist at St. Joseph’s Health Care Hamilton. McKinnon was able to turn her traumatic experience into a study that is helping shed light on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Margaret McKinnon, Psychologist: “As time went on and they made announcements about ditching into the ocean, I thought we would not survive. That’s what I thought.”
August 24, 2001. Margaret McKinnon was aboard Air Transat flight 236 with her husband en route to Lisbon for their honeymoon, when the plane suddenly ran out of fuel over the middle of the Atlantic.
Margaret: “They began preparing for a ditching of the aircraft at sea so there were a number of announcements that the plane would be ditching. There were countdowns to that. We were asked to brace to prepare for the impact.”
The plane’s systems shut down. For 30 excruciating minutes, passengers didn’t know if they would live or die. And then, land. The pilots guided the crippled Airbus to a rough landing on a small island in the Azores.
Margaret: “The tires tore up the runway and were on fire. We evacuated the plane down the chutes.”
All 306 people on board survived. There were very few physical injuries, but some, including McKinnon would go on to develop post traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
She went on to turn the event into the unique opportunity to conduct the first trauma study to test individuals who all experienced the same event.
15 passengers were asked to talk about their recollections of flight 236, of September 11th, 2001 which occurred just weeks later — and a neutral memory.
“We looked at was how vivid recollections were for the traumatic incident as well as what sort of other details were recalled”
Researchers found that regardless of whether passengers went on to develop PTSD, they showed enhanced recollection for the traumatic incident relative to September 11th and the neutral memory.
The study also showed that passengers who did develop PTSD recalled a higher number of details external to the incident compared to other passengers.
“They might have talked about factual information that wasn’t relevant to the memory they were trying to recollect. They may have repeated themselves.”
McKinnon says that’s probably a vulnerability factor for the development of PTSD — suggesting it is not just memory for the trauma itself that is related to PTSD. But also how a person processes memory for events in general.
