If the plane you’re on is high in the sky and starts to descend at a rapid rate of knots, you know you’re in trouble. It’s rare, but it happens. Of course people do survive these sorts of accidents but you know in your heart of hearts that if you’re over the sea, a mountain or a desert then you’re pretty much a goner.
It’s rare for people to survive aircraft accidents, but it’s rarer still for there to be just one survivor. This article covers a few such lucky/unlucky people.
Apparently people who are only survivors of serious accidents feel three types of guilt. There’s the guilt that they survived when so many others didn’t, there’s the guilt about what they didn’t do to help others, and there’s the guilt of what they did do, like clamber over people to get out or whatever desperate people do.
Here are four such survivors…
Mata was a writer for the Philippine Herald at the time of the incident. On March 16th, 1957, Mata was on a flight with President Magsaysay (the 7th President of the Philippines pictured above). The President was on his way to a speaking engagement with a small entourage and some reporters, 28 people in total.
It was 1:16am and Mata was half-asleep near the Presidential compartment. After the crash Mata was unconscious but when he came round:
I found myself on the side of a steep cliff among dried bushes…. Agonizing with pain, I was completely at a loss what to do. About three meters away from me were parts of the plane. They were still burning. Meanwhile, I heard the distant howling of a dog. It was only then that I felt hopeful of being rescued. Thinking that there were probably people living not far away from where I lay moaning with pain, I made an effort to shout. I noticed that my voice echoed in the nearby mountains.
After that, I began shouting, “Mr. President! Mr. President! Mr. President!” When no answer came, I shouted for Pablo Bautista, the reporter of the Liwayway magazine. “Pabling! Pabling!” Still no answer. It began to dawn on me that there was no other survivor except me.
He was rescued by local farmers who took 18 hours to get him down the side of the mountain. Mata was badly burned and spent 6 months in hospital.
Now in his late 80’s Mata has dedicated his life to journalism and music. He puts on his own piano concerts annually for friends and family members. He’s enjoyed a life of dangerous reportage in areas like Palestine, Egypt, Thailand and elsewhere.
More sole survivors on the next page…
Diller, born Juliane Koepcke, 1954, was a German biologist born in Peru. Both of her parents were zoologists and Diller intended to follow in their footsteps. Aged 17 she took a flight with her mother to Pucallpa to visit her father when her plane entered an electric storm.
The craft was 3.2 km above the ground when it was struck by lightning and disintegrated into separate parts. Diller was strapped into her seat as she fell to the jungle floor a couple of miles below.
Miraculously Diller survived with just a broken collarbone, a gash to her right arm and her right eye swollen shut. She initially looked for other passengers but could find none. She did find some sweets which would keep her alive, and a freshwater stream. She remembered her father had told her that if you follow a river down stream you would come to civilisation, so that’s what she did.
For 9 days she followed the river, unable to sleep because of insect bites that had become infected. She found a motor boat and poured petrol on her wounds which removed the majority of the maggots from her festering injuries…
I remember having seen my father when he cured a dog of worms in the jungle with gasoline. I got some gasoline and poured it on myself. I counted the worms when they started to slip out. There were 35 on my arm. I remained there but I wanted to leave. I didn’t want to take the boat because I didn’t want to steal it.
A few hours later the guys that used the shelter showed up, tended to her wounds and took her for a 7 hour canoe ride. From there she was helicoptered to hospital and her waiting father.
I had nightmares for a long time, for years, and of course the grief about my mother’s death and that of the other people came back again and again. The thought Why was I the only survivor? haunts me. It always will.
How did Diller survive? It’s quite amazing. The plane seat that she’d fallen to earth in was also attached to a seat either side which is thought to have acted like a parachute. The thick jungle foliage would also have broken her fall a bit.
Werner Herzog the documentarian covered the story in his Wings of Hope film because he himself was supposed to be on that ill fated flight until a last-minute itinerary change saved his life.
Diller moved to Germany, completed her science education and went on to study rain-forest bat species. She now works as a librarian at the Bavarian State Zoological Collection in Munich.
More sole survivors on the next page…
Vulović is the world record holder for having fallen from the greatest height and survived to tell the tale. At the time of the incident in 1972, she was a Serbian air hostess. The plane she was on was cruising at over 10,000 m in the air, yes, that’s 10 whole kilometres up. Or 6 and a bit miles.
JAT Flight 367 exploded and was scattered into separate parts. As often happens with these types of incidents it seems, Vulović wasn’t even meant to be flying that day, there was a rota switch up with a girl of a similar name.
The explosion that brought down the jet was ascribed to terrorism; one man had called a newspaper claiming the attack for a nationalist group, although no further evidence was found of the connection.
Vulović escaped the crash with a fractured skull and three broken vertebrae (one was completely destroyed). She was in a coma for 27 days and paralysed from the waist down for a short time…
I was in the middle part of the plane. I was found with my head down and my colleague on top of me. One part of my body with my leg was in the plane and my head was out of the plane. A catering trolley was pinned against my spine and kept me in the plane. The man who found me, says I was very lucky. He was in the German Army as a medic during World War II. He knew how to treat me at the site of the accident…
Vulović continued working for the airline, but from behind a desk, although she has no fear of flying surprisingly. She was eventually fired from her airline job for her constant and vehement protests about the overpowering regime of Slobodan Milošević. Vulović had become a national hero which probably saved her life for a second time, Milošević wasn’t exactly known for his mercy when it came to dissenters. Still to this day she is very vocal on the politics du jour.
Paul McCartney presented Vulović with a Guinness World Record for having fallen the furthest (10,160 metres) and survived in 1985. However, years on people have been challenging this impressive height. Rumours (and some official documents) suggest that the flight may have been accidentally shot down by the Czechoslovak Air Force just a few hundred rather than thousand metres up. Vesna Vulović refutes the claims but she has no memory from the time of boarding onwards so can’t be too much help.
The jury’s still out. But either way she was still a sole survivor.
More sole survivors on the next page…
Annette Herfkens is the sole survivor of Vietnam Airlines Flight 474 which crashed on November 14, 1992 in Vietnam. She managed to survive for eight days before finally being found. She was the sole survivor of 25 passengers (including her fiance) and 6 crew. The craft was the victim of a tropical storm. Herfkens was not the only person to survive the initial impact, but she was the only one to survive until a search party found them.
She was left in an immobile state on the jungle floor and survived by drinking rainwater and trying her best not to go completely mental. Herfkens returned years later to the site of the crash to climb the mountain where she once laid in terror. She recently released a book of the ordeal after years of silence.
Here are some words from the wise woman… a couple of tips if you find yourself in a similar situation…
Makes you feel happy to be alive and sat at your computer doesn’t it?
