Joe Yates
The sole survivor of a plane crash has detailed her final moments prior to impact with a mountain range, that left her alone in a jungle for more than a week.
Annette Herfkens was the only passenger to survive the tragic crash of Vietnam Airlines Flight 474 in November 1992.
She and her fiancé, Willem van der Pas, had been flying from Ho Chi Minh City to the Vietnamese coast for a romantic getaway when the unthinkable happened.
Annette, who suffered from claustrophobia, wasn’t comfortable boarding the small plane. Her fiancé, trying to calm her nerves, told her a white lie, saying the 55-minute flight would only be 20 minutes.
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But around 40 to 50 minutes in, the aircraft started to plummet and she recalls how Willem held her hand one last time.
"There were people screaming," she told CNN.
"I didn't think much of it, because it was of course a little plane like that will feel with such - 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, she was surrounded by the wreckage and the bodies of the other passengers - including Willem, who she had been with for 13 years.
The small plane had smashed into a mountain ridge in the dense jungle.
Injured and alone, Annette faced what would have felt like an impossible situation - she sustained a collapsed lung, a hanging jaw, and 12 broken bones across her hip and knee.
Reflecting on her escape in an interview with The Guardian, she admits she doesn’t remember exactly how she got out of the fuselage, only that she somehow crawled down the mountain.
“That’s where you have fight or flight. I definitely chose flight,” she said.
For eight days, Annette survived in the jungle with severe injuries and parching thirst, yet she refused to give in to fear.
“I stayed in the moment. I trusted that they were going to find me," she told the publication, referencing the search party she anticipated was out looking for her.
"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'.”
After surviving the ordeal, thanks to the search party reaching her on her eighth day in the jungle, Annette now works as a motivational speaker - giving up her time in banking.
She went on to marry one of her colleagues, Jamie Lupa, before moving to New york and having two children.
Tragically, her ex-husband died in 2021 after the pair had split.