An account of the 2001 Yemenia plane crash in Asmara, Eritrea, as witnessed from Seat 19B. The flight had already been in trouble, turning round inexplicably mid-flight, some twenty-four hours previously, with the official explanation of bad weather in Asmara openly questioned (it was a one-hour flight), and rumours of computer failure abounding.
On board was a slowly decomposing body, being escorted by a grieving brother and denied refrigeration in the ensuing forced sojourn in Sana'a.
Off the runway
The runway came into view a few feet below us. We continued to fly and didn’t seem to be nearing it at all. When we finally did land, at high speed, I sat back a little perturbed, but I was soon caught up in the emotion on the plane. The Eritreans were cheering and clapping rhythmically. Their nightmare ordeal was over and they were back on home soil. Literally.
The cheers gave way to stunned silence as the plane left the runway and continued to travel. I remember clutching on to the underside of my seat and looking at Jorgen. He was looking at me, not terrified, but as a soldier, trained for the worst. It was like being in a four by four jeep, except that we were in a 727. We had a bumpy ride for some seconds and then we came to a halt at about thirty degrees.
I have always been somewhat blasé about wearing seat-belts on planes, but those belts saved me and others from serious injury, as our bodies were thrust forward by the decelerating plane. Without the belt, I am sure that I would have been propelled several rows forward.
The silence continued for a few moments, as people collected themselves. There was no screaming, no panic. I looked at Jorgen and he at me. There was nothing to say. We looked out of the window and could see the wing below us embedded in the grass. The wheels had left the aircraft some metres back.
And then the strangest thing - here we were, in a crashed plane, whose evacuation should have been a priority, and passengers were casually undoing seat-belts, then standing up (albeit at an angle due to the plane’s final resting position) and then opening the overhead lockers to retrieve their hand luggage, as though the landing had been textbook after all.
A crash course in the local language
Because of the broken wing and lopsided plane, only two of the emergency exits, one at the front and one at the rear, were available. We were going down the chutes. Everything was still calm and I waited in the aisle with all the others, when a certain commotion broke out ahead. And then the word came back in Tigrinyan, not a language I am familiar with, but I understood one word - benzin. Now there was more urgency, but I was calm and managed to pacify a terrified lady behind me. And so it was down the chute with the smell of leaking fuel in my nostrils.
The man in front of me had been in a wheelchair, but this was no time for niceties and he was flung onto the black chute. I escaped to 100 metres away and then took stock. Fire engines were quickly on the scene and everyone stayed calm. Jorgen took out his camera to record the crash, but he was prevented from doing so by Eritrean officials, we were not sure why. Within minutes, the Eritreans were laughing again, as this just one more episode in a nightmare saga, but at least they were finally home. I thought of the corpse on the plane.
The crew was shell-shocked. The two pilots, their careers surely over in what was a clear case of pilot error, stood there in stunned silence, but a stewardess was muttering angrily. I went over to see if she was okay and she addressed me in English:
“It was all wrong. Passengers should get off first, they should not have retrieved their luggage. They should have got off.”
We had gone against the textbook procedure for surviving the plane crash and, to her, that was unforgivable, worse than the crash itself. She was obviously in deep shock. Thinking back, the stewardesses had been conspicuous by their absence in the cabin. I suppose it must have been they who opened the emergency exits, but there had been no leadership, no instructions. They must have trained for such an eventuality, but never expected to ever use that training. Miraculously, nobody was even slightly injured.
So that is what it was like to be in a plane crash. But you know what, there is some good news? The oxygen masks do come down automatically.
Paul Bradbury - Author of Hvar: An Insider's Guide to Croatia's Premier Island, and Lebanese Nuns Don't Ski
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