A woman who survived a plane crash has shared her harrowing experience of facing death as the aircraft collided with a mountain range, leaving her stranded in a jungle for over a week.
Annette Herfkens emerged as the only survivor from the ill-fated Vietnam Airlines Flight 474 crash in November 1992.
She and her fiancé, Willem van der Pas, were traveling from Ho Chi Minh City to the Vietnamese coast for a romantic vacation when disaster struck.
Annette, who was claustrophobic, felt uneasy about boarding the small plane. In an attempt to soothe her anxieties, her fiancé reassured her with a little white lie, telling her the 55-minute journey would last only 20 minutes.
However, around 40 to 50 minutes into the flight, the plane began to descend rapidly. Annette recalls Willem clutching her hand one final time.
“There were people screaming,” she recounted to 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.”
Upon regaining consciousness, Annette found herself amidst the wreckage and surrounded by the deceased passengers, including Willem, her partner of 13 years.
The small aircraft had crashed into a mountain ridge in a dense jungle.
Despite sustaining serious injuries, Annette faced the daunting challenge alone—she had a collapsed lung, a dislocated jaw, and 12 fractures in her hip and knee.
In an interview with The Guardian, she reflects on her escape, admitting she doesn’t recall how she exited the fuselage, only remembering crawling down the mountain.
“That’s where you have fight or flight. I definitely chose flight,” she said.
For eight days, Annette managed to survive in the jungle despite her severe injuries and overwhelming thirst, maintaining a mindset free of fear.
“I stayed in the moment. I trusted that they were going to find me,” she told the publication, referring to the search party she believed was 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 being rescued by the search team on her eighth day in the jungle, Annette transitioned from her banking career to become a motivational speaker.
She later married a colleague, Jamie Lupa, and relocated to New York, where she had two children.
Unfortunately, her former husband passed away in 2021 after their separation.