The Story Behind the Photo of Stevie Nicks, George Harrison and Bob Longhi in Hana, Hawaii in 1978

Stevie Nicks told Maui News shortly after Bob Longhi’s death in 2012. “Had it not been for Longhi, I wouldn’t have gone to Hana to hang out with George for two days.” The photo of the trio hanging in Hana has special significance for Fleetwood Mac’s legendary singer, who brings it when she goes on tour.

“The photo was taken by my best friend, Mary (DeVitto),” Stevie explained. “She had given me a copy of it a long time ago, and I had it made into an 8x10 and put in a little frame. When I go on the road it goes right on my makeup mirror, so before I go on stage, whether it’s with Fleetwood Mac or me in my solo career, the three of us are looking back at me and that has been my inspiration every single night. There’s lots of nights where you kind of go, I wish I didn’t have to go on stage tonight, I’m tired, I don’t feel like doing it, and I look at George Harrison and look at Longhi and look at me and I go, well, you just have to, because it’s important, it’s important to make people happy, so get out of your chair, put on your boots and go out there and do your thing.”

The purpose of George’s visit to Maui in 1978 was to write songs for his new album George Harrison, but also so he and his then-girlfriend and future wife, Olivia Arias, could relax before becoming parents for the first time. The two musicians were having fun coming up with lyrics together in Hana. “We were writing a sort of parody of ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ but we were writing ‘Here Comes the Moon,’” she continued. “Longhi was saying, ‘you guys are writing about the moon instead of the sun,’ and I said, that’s because by then we were all such night birds.

“I had met George before that at a record party in Mexico in Acapulco for Rumours. Longhi saw George all the time. He drove me and my friend Sara and Mary to George's house in Hana. And we just hung out and wrote and sang and talked. I had been famous for not even quite three years and we were talking with George about being famous and what it meant and what you had to give up.”

Flash forward 30 or so years. During Stevie’s trip to Maui in late May 2012, she gave Bob a copy of the historic photo. The news of his death stunned her.

“It’s so strange, in the last six months I lost my mom and my godson OD’d and I kind of went underground after that. Then I went to Hawaii and went to see Longhi and spent several hours at his house with four of my best girlfriends.

“He was feeling great and he looked great and was excited about life. He was happy and glowing. We had such a great time. I had made an album in 2010 (In Your Dreams) that we filmed over a year at my house. It's a documentary and I wanted to show him it, but I ended up having to go back to Los Angeles. I’m so sorry I didn’t get to show him the documentary because he would’ve loved it so much, because it was an album made like the albums we made in the old days with a big house and 20 people there every day and dinners every night, like in the true form of Led Zeppelin. I’m really grateful I had those couple of hours with him.”

Since Longhi’s opened in the late 1970s, over the years Stevie performed there, “a bunch of times,” she noted. “Mick probably played a gazillion times and if I was there I went, too. Mick has always loved Maui, that’s why the rest of us went to Maui. Because Mick was always there, whenever there was a vacation all of us followed suit. And the first thing I do when I get to Maui is go to Longhi’s.”

Cherishing the memories of her time spent on Maui Stevie concludes: “We were laughing when we got together this time and reminisced about our trip to Hana with George Harrison. We were really young then. We were rocking and beautiful and crazy. And that was all going down on Maui. And Longhi’s was like a sanctuary for all of us. I hope so much his kids will keep it alive and jumping because I can’t imagine Lahaina without Longhi’s. I think his spirit will always be there. He loved it so much. It’s a diamond amongst all the other jewels.”

April 28, 1988: The Roof of an Aloha Airlines Jet Ripped Off in Mid-Air at 24,000 Feet, But the Plane Still Managed to Land Safely!

It was just another routine inter-island flight when an Aloha Airlines jet took off from Hilo, bound for Honolulu, on April 28, 1988. Cruising at 24,000 feet, an 18-foot section of the plane’s roof suddenly ripped off, causing an explosive decompression, creating a gaping hole in the fuselage and sucking a flight attendant out of the plane.

The Boeing 737 landed safely at Kahului Airport on Maui, but it goes down as one of the most significant events in aviation history.

Flight 243 departed from Hilo International Airport at 13:25 on April 28, 1988, with six crew members and 89 passengers on board, bound for Honolulu. Nothing unusual was noted during the pre-departure inspection of the aircraft, which had already completed three round-trip flights from Honolulu to Hilo, Maui, and Kauai earlier that day, all uneventful. Meteorological conditions were checked but there were no advisories for weather phenomena reported along the air route, per AIRMETs or SIGMETs.

After a routine takeoff and ascent, the aircraft had reached its normal flight altitude of 24,000 feet (7,300 m), when at around 13:48, about 23 nautical miles (43 km; 26 mi) south-southeast of Kahului on the island of Maui, a small section on the left side of the roof ruptured with a “whooshing” sound. The captain felt the aircraft roll to the left and right, and the controls went loose; the first officer noticed pieces of grey insulation floating above the cabin. The cockpit door had broken away and the captain could see “blue sky where the first-class ceiling had been.” The resulting explosive decompression had torn off a large section of the roof, consisting of the entire top half of the aircraft skin extending from just behind the cockpit to the fore-wing area, a length of about 18.5 feet (5.6 m).

There was one fatality: 58-year-old flight attendant Clarabelle Lansing, who was swept out of the airplane while standing near the fifth row seats; her body was never found. Lansing was a veteran flight attendant of 37 years at the time of the incident. Eight other people suffered serious injuries. All of the passengers had been seated and wearing their seat belts during the depressurization.

Co-pilot Tompkins was flying the aircraft when the incident occurred; Captain Schornstheimer took over and steered the aircraft toward the closest airport, on Maui island. Thirteen minutes later, the crew performed an emergency landing on Kahului Airport’s Runway 2. Upon landing, the aircraft’s emergency evacuation slides were deployed and passengers quickly evacuated from the aircraft. A total of 65 people were reported injured, eight of them with serious injuries. At the time, Maui had no plan in place for an emergency of this type. The injured were taken to the hospital in tour vans belonging to Akamai Tours (now defunct), driven by office personnel and mechanics, as the island only had two ambulances. Air traffic control radioed Akamai and requested as many of their 15-passenger vans as they could spare to go to the airport (three miles from their base) to transport the injured. Two of the Akamai drivers were former paramedics and established a triage on the runway. The aircraft was written off.

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