Canadian Survivor Recounts Horrific Thai Plane Crash
Posted September 17, 2007 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Mildred Anne Furlong watched television footage of the crash she survived from her hospital bed, and after seeing the fiery carnage that claimed at least 89 lives for the second time, all the Prince George, B.C. woman could express was disbelief at the fact that she somehow made it out alive.
“The flames were coming towards us … there were people burning,” the 23-year-old said from Bangkok Phuket Hospital. “It looks so bad.
“And, there was only a few of us that got out on our own. It’s amazing that I was one of them. We were very blessed to get out.”
Seemingly against all odds, Furlong, who was vacationing in Thailand, sustained only whiplash and some minor scratches when the MD-82 aircraft crashed during a downpour Sunday before skidding off the runway, snapping in two and bursting into flames.
The flight was carrying mostly tourists from Bangkok to Phuket — one of Thailand’s most popular resort islands, and in addition to the dozens of fatalities more than 40 were injured. The plane was carrying 123 passengers and a crew of seven.
The young woman doesn’t know exactly why she survived while others perished so graphically, and says all she did as the plane went down was put her head between her knees. What she saw when she looked up are images that will likely stay with her for a lifetime.
“I looked up and saw the flames were coming towards us from the front of the cabin. And we saw these flames coming, and they stopped. There were people burning,” she said.
“The seats across from us, there were flames right beside us. Most of the people on that side of the plane, I don’t think they made it out.”
Furlong and a friend made a quick escape through a window that had been kicked out by another passenger.
“We were in seat 23, next to the wing, and the guys right behind us had opened their window. They got out and we were right behind them,:” she said.
Furlong added she had a sense of trouble as the plane began its doomed descent.
“When we broke through the clouds it was quite dark and it was raining a lot,” she recalled. “As we started to come lower we looked out the window and the trees were blowing, like really, really hard,” she said. “We went to land and he couldn’t land.
“He pulled back up. Then we took a sharp right and then we hit the grass. It plowed into trees, the bushes, into the hill.”
On Monday, authorities found the two flight data recorders, leading an airline official to speculate that wind shear may have caused the crash. The crash was Thailand’s worst air accident in a decade.
