Annette Herfkens had been nervous as she stepped aboard Vietnam Airlines Flight 474, bound for a romantic break with her fiancé. Little did she know just how terrifying things were about to get
To survive a plane crash where everybody else perished is remarkable enough. But to survive out in the wilderness for eight long days afterward is nothing short of miraculous.
This is the extraordinary story of Annette Herfkens, the lone surviving passenger aboard the doomed Vietnam Airlines Flight 474, which crashed in November 1992, with tragic consequences. She and her fiancé, Willem van der Pas, had been flying from Ho Chi Minh City to the Vietnamese coast for a romantic break when disaster struck.
Afflicted by claustrophobia, Annette wasn’t altogether comfortable stepping aboard the small plane, crammed with 25 passengers and six crew members. In fact, he told a white lie to reassure her, pretending the flight was just 20 minutes. But it was Willem who became nervous when the plane suddenly started to drop 40 minutes into their journey.
As Willem held her hand for the final time, the world around them went black. And when Annette came to, she was surrounded by bodies. Sadly, Willem, whom she’d been with for 13 years, was among the dead.
The tiny aircraft had hurtled into a mountain ridge deep in the Vietnamese jungle, while the sound of the wilderness poured through a hole in the fuselage. For many, it would have felt like an impossibly bleak situation, but Annette found within herself a remarkable resilience.
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As previously shared in a candid interview with The Guardian, on top of the emotional turmoil of losing the man she’d hoped to marry, Annette was also having to deal with an excruciating array of injuries, including 12 broken bones in her hip and knee, a hanging jaw and a collapsed lung.
Looking back more than 20 years on, Annette wasn’t able to say for sure how she managed to clamber out of the wreckage, but knows she must have crawled outside and lifted herself down to earth, before crawling yet another 30 yards. An act that must have taken extraordinary strength and courage. Annette reflected: “That’s where you have fight or flight. I definitely chose flight.”
For the next eight days, Annette survived in the jungle, parched with thirst and with serious, untreated injuries. But she never let herself fear the worst. She explained: “I stayed in the moment. I trusted that they were going to find me … I did not think: ‘What if a tiger comes?’ I thought: ‘I’ll deal with it when the tiger comes.’ I did not think: ‘What if I die?’ I thought: ‘I will see about it when I die’.”
Showing amazing resourcefulness, Annette found an ingenious way to quench her thirst, by using insulation material from the plane’s wing as a sponge to soak up moisture. She had to pull herself along on her elbows, causing so much damage that she required a skin graft.
All the while, she had to listen to the silencing moans of her fellow survivors and deal with the smells that she has since strived to forget. Then, when it dawned on her that she was completely alone, she began to panic, with her collapsed lung making it even more difficult to draw breath. She focused on breathing and somehow pulled through.
Eventually, a rescue party arrived and carried Annette down the mountain. From thereon, the next stage of her healing began. In her life before the crash, Annette had worked for Santander in Madrid, where she’d been the only woman on the trading floor.
Now an inspirational speaker, Annette went on to marry her colleague, Jaime Lupa, with whom she moved to New York and welcomed two children. They later divorced, and Jaime sadly died in 2021, on the anniversary of Willem’s death. All these years on, and Annette’s experiences have stayed with her, making sure to always sit in the front row of a plane, as the sight of another seatback makes her think of the dead body that lay on top of her after the crash.
Even something as small as a friend ordering Vietnamese food can feel jarring, while she always makes sure to carry water with her wherever she goes, knowing just what it means to be truly thirsty. And she still makes sure to remember Willem, counting each day for eight days after his anniversary.
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