Last-minute seat switch saved life of stewardess
Madrid air crash survivor tells tale
Sunday August 24 2008
THE sole crew member to survive last week's Madrid air disaster has explained how her life was saved by a last-minute decision to switch her seat from the back of the plane to the front.
Stewardess Antonia Martinez Jimenez, 27, normally sat at the back of the plane during take-off and landing. But last Wednesday, on the Spanair flight to Gran Canaria that crashed with the loss of 153 lives, she was rostered to sit at the front.
All the other 18 survivors of the crash were sitting in the rows around her, and when the plane broke apart as the take-off failed at Barajas airport, most were thrown clear of the wreckage and away from the subsequent explosion that engulfed it. In a further stroke of good fortune, they landed in a stream where the water shielded them from the blistering heat, as a massive fuel fire scorched the area.
"I heard some people calling for help, but I couldn't do anything," said Miss Martinez Jimenez, who was still strapped in her seat when she landed in the stream. "A few minutes later, I heard the sirens and thought, I am saved."
From her bed in Madrid's La Princesa Hospital, where she is being treated for broken bones and burns, Miss Martinez Jimenez, who previously worked for Ryanair, said she had no proper recollection of the moments leading up to the crash. However, she added: "I will never fly again. It was horrible."
Her parents had been sitting down to lunch when they saw on the television news that a plane had crashed at Barajas airport, and had initially assumed their daughter was dead.
"We thought the worst," recalled her father, Dionisio. "She had called less than 10 minutes before to say the plane was about to depart."
Her mobile phone line went dead, but several agonising hours later her parents received a call from hospital staff, who said she had survived. The phone was passed to Miss Martinez Jimenez, and in a barely audible voice she told them: "Mummy, don't worry, I'm alive."
She has not yet been told that the rest of the 10 crew are dead. Crash investigators hope that her short-term amnesia may eventually lift and that she will be able to shed light on what happened immediately before the accident.
Another survivor described the horrifying moments just after take-off when the plane lost power and plummeted to the ground.
"Everything went very fast, a strange, shaking sensation as the plane tossed up and down and left to right," said bank clerk Beatriz Ojeda Reyes, 41.
The survivors' accounts of the crash emerged as some 200 family members and friends of victims held a heated meeting with executives from the airline on Friday evening. At one point, scuffles broke out, with relatives claiming that some victims had been denied requests to leave the plane after it failed a first take-off attempt.
Funerals for the victims have been taking place across Spain and the Canary Islands, most of them strictly private affairs. Among the biggest was in the small mountainside town of San Bartolome, in Gran Canaria, which was due to hold a mourning ceremony for 13 victims of the crash over the weekend. A village fiesta which had been scheduled to take place yesterday was cancelled.
Among the dead was Laudencio Garcia, 51, the headmaster for 15 years at a local primary school who was also a councillor. His wife, Lucrecia Hernandez, 52, a teacher, and their two children, Elena, 16, and Carlos, 14, are also among the dead. "They were both enormously respected and kind," Mr Suarez said of the couple. "They must have educated about 3,000 local children over the years."
© Telegraph
- Fiona Govan and Ed Owen
