Joe Yates
The sole survivor of a plane crash has revealed the chilling reason she always chooses the same seat when flying.
Annette Herfkens survived the tragic crash of Vietnam Airlines Flight 474 in November 1992, which left her stranded alone in a jungle for eight days.
Annette - who was 31 at the time - and her fiancé, Willem van der Pas, had been flying from Ho Chi Minh City to the Vietnamese coast for what was supposed to be a romantic getaway, and were joined on the the small aircraft with 23 other passengers and six crew members.
Being claustrophobic, Annette initially refused to board, but Willem told her a white lie, that the flight would only take 20 minutes.
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Around 40 minutes in, the plane suddenly plunged.
“There were people screaming,” Annette told CNN. “I didn't think much of it, because it was of course a little plane... to feel such drop. And then he was scared, we kept on flying another giant drop - he grabbed for my hand, I grabbed for his, and everything went black.”
When she came to, Annette found herself surrounded by the wreckage, the bodies of other passengers, and her fiancé lying nearby.
Despite all the trauma that came with flying, incredibly she still boards planes.
Her one rule however, is that she must sit on the first row - when possible - as she explained how seeing the back of another seat reminds her of the weight of one of the dead passengers that had landed on her all those years ago.
Just months after the crash she flew back to her home in Madrid, Spain, but this journey was done without her partner of 13 years - Willem.
However, Annette's survival journey hadn't concluded with the plane crash.
Injured and alone, she faced a collapsed lung, a hanging jaw, and 12 broken bones.
“That’s where you have fight or flight. I definitely chose flight,” she later said. Somehow, she crawled out of the fuselage and down the mountain, relying on instinct and sheer determination.
“I stayed in the moment. I trusted that they were going to find me,” she told The Guardian.
“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'.”
Eight days after her plane struck two mountain ridges, the Dutchwoman - who survived in the jungle, battling thirst and injuries - was rescued by a search party after refusing to give in to fear.
After returning home, Annette - who worked in Madrid for the Spanish banking giant Santander - left the banking industry behind to become a motivational speaker.
She married a colleague, moved to New York, and had two children.
Yet the trauma lingers in small, specific ways, through everyday triggers - like a friend ordering Vietnamese food, which can see emotions unexpectedly ambush her.