A woman who survived a plane crash has shared the haunting reason she consistently selects the same seat when she travels by air.
Annette Herfkens was the only survivor of the Vietnam Airlines Flight 474 disaster in November 1992, enduring eight days alone in a jungle after the crash.
At the age of 31, Annette and her fiancé, Willem van der Pas, embarked on what was meant to be a romantic trip from Ho Chi Minh City to the Vietnamese coast. They were accompanied on the small aircraft by 23 other passengers and six crew members.
Due to her claustrophobia, Annette was initially hesitant to board the flight, but Willem eased her concerns with a little fib, assuring her it would only last 20 minutes.
About 40 minutes into the flight, the aircraft plummeted without warning.
“There were people screaming,” Annette recounted to 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.”
Upon regaining consciousness, Annette found herself amidst the debris, surrounded by the deceased passengers, with her fiancé nearby.
Despite the traumatic memories associated with flying, Annette continues to take to the skies.
However, she insists on sitting in the first row whenever possible, as seeing another seat back reminds her of the weight of a deceased passenger that had landed on her during the crash.
She returned to her home in Madrid, Spain, just months after the incident, though she made this journey without Willem, her partner of 13 years.
But Annette’s ordeal did not end with surviving the crash.
Alone and injured, she was plagued by a collapsed lung, a dislocated jaw, and 12 fractured bones.
“That’s where you have fight or flight. I definitely chose flight,” she later reflected. With remarkable resolve, she managed to crawl from the wreckage and descend the mountain, driven by instinct and willpower.
“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 the crash, which saw her plane collide with two mountain ridges, Annette – who survived in the jungle, battling thirst and injuries – was finally rescued by a search team after her determined refusal to succumb to fear.
Upon her return, Annette left her career at the Spanish banking giant Santander in Madrid and transitioned into a role as a motivational speaker.
She later married a coworker, moved to New York, and started a family with two children.
However, the trauma still resonates in subtle ways, through everyday encounters – such as a friend ordering Vietnamese cuisine, which can unexpectedly rekindle her emotions.