'Born in a shirt': how was the fate of those who survived plane crashes

Are the survivors of the crash afraid to fly, do they celebrate their second birthday, and did they have a premonition of trouble before boarding the plane, says Life.ru.

Фото: Depositphotos

“I handed over my ticket”, “I didn’t make it on time for the flight”, “I had a disturbing dream”... After the crash of passenger airliners, as a rule, at least one such story comes to light.

The number of those who escape from the giant iron grave is much smaller. In the magazine Popular Mechanics, experts published data according to which the life chances of passengers who choose a seat in the rear increase by 40%. Professor of mathematical modeling and engineering at the University of Greenwich in London, Ed Galea, refutes this data, arguing that there is no “happy place” on board. The safety of all seats is the same.

The percentage of people who survived the crash is minimal. And what happens to them next? How do they live after the second birth?

Kamil Bazhenov

Photo: VK Kamil Bazhenov

In April, a UTair passenger plane crashed near Tyumen 2012. The liner, which was heading to Surgut, fell through 42 seconds after takeoff. This time was enough to gain a height of about 200 meters.

As it turned out later, the airliner collapsed due to the decision of the FAC not to conduct anti-icing treatment, although there was snow on the plane. Because of this, the crew was unable to recognize in time what was happening and take the aircraft out of the catastrophic situation. After the incident, UTair obliged all its aircraft to be treated with an anti-icing agent. Previously, this decision was made by the captain.

As a result, 33 people died, 10 survived. One of those who escaped was Kamil Bazhenov. The young man was then 27 years old. I was flying to a business meeting. It so happened that Kamil mixed up the queues and first stood at the check-in counter for the flight to Moscow. Only after a few minutes did he find out that he was “in the other direction.” I took my ticket 16A (in the rear section) and walked to the plane at the right time.

Kamil later said: the bus, which was supposed to deliver passengers to the board, stood for quite a long time - late passengers were hurrying to it. But all had time, the plane took off without delay.

“We ask you to fasten your seat belts, remove the folding tables...” Everything was going according to plan, when suddenly, after a few seconds, shaking began on board, which only intensified. Kamil woke up already on the ground. He was able to raise his hand so that rescuers could see him. And then... he was conscious, but did not react to anything around him. I couldn’t remember what happened.

He received ten fractures and tore four ligaments, for several months he learned to walk again.

- Before the disaster, I had a rather difficult period in my life. I work in tough conditions. In personal terms, it was not easy ... But I do not lose heart. The black bar will change to white. If this happened to a person, then it is necessary to fight, - said the young man.

A little more than a year after the tragedy, Kamil got married and became an entrepreneur. On his pages on social networks you won’t find posts about planes or plane crashes. Only the electronic photo album “New Life” reminds of what happened, and even that contains two photographs. And the first entry after the disaster, dated May 30, 2012: “Thank you all so much for your support, it helped me a lot, especially when I was in intensive care.”

Cecilia Sichan (Crocker)

A photograph of little Cecilia Sichan spread around the world in 1987. A four-year-old girl miraculously survived a plane crash in Detroit on August 16. McDonnell Douglas MD-82 airliner of Northwest Airlines was unable to gain height - it flew straight into the pole. The pilots were able to divert the aircraft from a head-on collision, but the left wing was damaged. The plane went out of control, fell on a nearby highway and broke down, slipping a few meters.

As it turned out later, the accident occurred due to the fact that the crew could not control the speed and angle of take-off. In addition, according to the Daily Mail, there was no signal that the plane was not ready for takeoff. The reasons for the failure of the electronics on board remained unclear. The crash killed 153 people - passengers and crew members, as well as two witnesses of the crash.

The only survivor was Cecilia, whom her mother covered with her body. The girl was returning from vacation with her parents and brother. The very moment of the collision she does not remember.

To talk about the tragedy, she decided only after a quarter of a century.

- I think about what happened every day. It's hard not to think about it when I look in the mirror. I have scars on my arms and legs, on my forehead, ”she said.

The girl's skull was injured, her leg and collarbone were broken. In addition, she received third degree burns. The fact that she survived with such injuries can also be called a miracle. The girl spent seven weeks in the hospital, after which her uncle Franklin Lumpkin and her aunt Rita, the mother’s sister, took the child to be raised. To hide it from the eyes of journalists, they moved from Arizona to Alabama. The distance between her hometown and where the family moved is about two thousand kilometers.

The girl does not remember anything about a plane crash. And the fact that she became the only surviving passenger, found out only in high school.

- I felt guilty. Why me? Why didn't my brother survive? Why not someone else? - she said in the movie Sole Survivor.

She made a small tattoo of the aircraft on her left wrist as a reminder of the tragedy, which, however, does not forget.

The girl honestly admitted that she did not develop any superpowers, she did not acquire a fear of flying, but she never intended to work as a flight attendant. Years later, the “chief American orphan,” as the media dubbed her in the late 80s, was tracked down by firefighter John Thieu, who found her on the plane and urgently handed her over to paramedics. In 2012, he even walked at her wedding. Cecilia also decided to keep in touch with the families of the victims. The girl admitted in an interview that she sincerely tries to live a normal life. But one look in the mirror again brings her back to the feeling of guilt that she was the one who survived that plane crash.

Juliana cap

The plane crash in Peru, which resulted in the death of a 92 man, occurred on December 24 1971. Aircraft Lockheed L-188 Electra hit in a thunderstorm.

The only one who survived was 17-year-old Juliana Margaret Cap. Her father is the zoologist Hans Kapke, and her mother is the ornithologist Maria Kepke. The girl studied in the city of Lima.

That day, Julian and her mother went to her father - he conducted research in the South American jungle. All together were planning to celebrate Christmas.

Until the end of the voyage, there remained about 20 minutes, when a heavy talk began on board. The plane flew into the cloud. The girl's mother looked out the window and repeated that something was wrong.

“Suddenly we entered a very heavy dark cloud.” My mother was worried, but I was fine, I liked to fly, ”a woman told a BBC interview later.

The plane literally jumped up and down: jumping up and down, parcels and baggage falling off the shelves, gifts, flowers and Christmas cakes were flying across the board. The passengers began to cry and scream. Juliana did not let go of her mother's hand.

“My mother said: “It’s over, it’s over.” “Those were the last words I heard from her,” the woman recalls.

After this, the plane went into a tailspin. Juliana lost consciousness. I only woke up, as it turned out, the next day, and my first thought was: “I survived the plane crash.”

In several places she had broken collarbone, in addition, ligaments in the knee joint were torn. But at that moment she did not feel these injuries - the girl was in the heat of passion. She understood that it was necessary to get out urgently.

“Before the crash, I spent a year and a half with my parents at a research station just 30 miles from where the plane crashed. I learned a lot about life in the rainforest. I heard the search airplanes circling, but I could not see them because of the dense forest, she recalls.

The girl lost her glasses and saw almost nothing. Juliana was very afraid to stumble upon poisonous snakes that are disguised among the leaves. During the day, she went to a small stream and went downstream. After all, it meant that somewhere he fell into the river. And where the river - most likely, there is a civilization.

Not far from the crash site, she found a bag of Christmas candy.

The girl walked about 10 days. She was paralyzed by a sense of panic, because on the way at first she came across torn passengers. She peered at the faces of people with one simple question: is there a mother among them? And, understanding that these were other people, she felt relief and shame at the same time.

The 17-year-old girl had many wounds, where at some point the larvae started. She pulled them out with her hands, barely holding back so as not to scream in pain.

“At some point, I heard the voices of several men.” It was like the voices of angels. When they saw me, they became alarmed and stopped talking. They thought I was a kind of aquatic goddess — a figure from a local legend, ”recalled Julian.

As a result, the teenager was able to explain who she is and what happened. During the day, local residents provided assistance on their own. A day later they managed to get to the rescuers.

Mother girls found a little more than two weeks after the crash. It turned out that she did not die, but received many injuries. The doctors tried to bring her back to life for several days, but eventually the woman passed away.

Juliana tried to forget all this nightmare, but the environment did not allow this to be done. The media was literally on their heels, the directors attacked, strangers started talking on the street. The story of Juliana Kapke formed the basis of the plot of the American-Italian film Miracles Still Happen, which was filmed in 1974. It ended with the fact that she refused to give interviews of any kind.

Juliana was able to talk about the tragedy only in the early 2000s. Director Werner Herzog approached her and invited her to film the documentary “Juliana’s Fall into the Jungle.” She agreed to give several interviews. A decade later, in 2011, she herself wrote a book, the title of which translates as “When I Fell from the Sky.”

Juliana, as she dreamed, became a mammiologist (a section of zoology that studies mammals). She admitted that she is not afraid to fly, but does not love. And it is still looking for the answer to a simple question: why do air crashes occur?

“Since this happened to me, I have been following plane crashes.” It is very important for me to know why they occur. It is important for me to find an explanation. Our fall was never explained, she says.

The only fear that remained for the rest of her life is that when she enters the zone of turbulence her hands sweat and squeeze her heart.

Vesna Vulovic

A stewardess entered the Guinness Book of Records as a survivor after falling from a height of more than 10 thousands of meters.

The plane crash, which involved a Yugoslav Airlines flight attendant, occurred on January 26, 1972. There were 28 people on board the plane, which was heading from Copenhagen to Zagreb. The flight took place as usual, the airliner was in the air for about an hour when it began to collapse: the bow with the cockpit separated from the main body.

The experts concluded that an explosive device was on board. After 10 days after the crash, the Czechoslovak State Security Service presented fragments of an alarm clock, which was identified as part of an explosive mechanism. The names of the likely terrorists were established, but they were never found.

22-year-old flight attendant Vesna Vulovich doesn’t remember anything about the fatal flight. The last thing left in the memory is how the cleaning lady cleans the board of the aircraft. After a couple of hours she was found on one of the wreckage of the aircraft itself.

“A loud explosion, a very bright light and unbearable cold - that’s all I remember about that disaster,” she said in an interview with Sobesednik. — A local resident, German Bruno, came across me. I felt my pulse and realized that my spine was broken, so I didn’t move my body, but immediately called for help.

As it turned out, she has many fractures and memory loss. Waking up in the hospital, Spring could not remember what had happened. And also where she is, why there are no favorite dogs and cats nearby and for what reason parents with tears in their eyes.

“I broke my left arm and left leg, three vertebrae (one of them was simply crushed), in several places I broke my skull,” said the former stewardess in the AIF commentary.

Like others who survived the plane crash, realizing what had happened, Spring felt a sense of guilt. She could not understand why she survived, and her colleagues and passengers died. And why she was saved.

In general, at such a height, the heart was most likely not able to withstand, however, Vulovich had very low blood pressure since childhood. In addition, she lost consciousness, which saved her life.

She learned to talk, remember everything and even walk again. It took her four and a half years to get around on her feet. She's been a little limp all her life.

And yet, the first thing Vulovich did when she returned from sick leave... went to get a job at Yugoslav Airlines as a flight attendant. The airline did not accept the arguments that “you can’t shoot at the same crater twice” and that therefore “it is a guarantor of flight safety.” Vulovich was not allowed to work on board, but was given a job in the office. She worked at the airline until retirement. There were no children.

A woman died at her home in Belgrade in December 2016.

Larisa Savitskaya

Photo: polit.ru

Another record holder for “landing height without a parachute” is 20-year-old Larisa. She had just gotten married and was returning from a honeymoon with her husband on an An-24 plane from Komsomolsk-on-Amur to Blagoveshchensk. Their plane was at an altitude of 5220 meters when a Tu-16 military bomber crashed into it at full speed. The debris scattered over several kilometers. The girl tightly grabbed the remains of the chair and flew down.

“I remember a terrible blow, a burn - the temperature instantly dropped from plus 25 to minus 30. Terrible screams and whistling air. My husband died immediately - at that moment my life ended. I didn’t even scream—out of grief I didn’t have time to realize the fear. At first I lost consciousness, and when I came to my senses, I lay there and thought - but not about death, but about pain. I don’t want it to hurt when I fall,” Savitskaya later told Izvestia.

The girl did not count on salvation. The only thing that beat in my head was the desire to die without pain. But by some miracle she, having crashed into a tree, survived. Upon impact, she knocked out all her teeth, Larisa damaged the spine in five places, broke her arm, ribs, legs.

For three days she could not even open her eyes. And when I woke up, the first thing I saw was my husband’s body.

“I was in such a state of shock that I didn’t feel pain. I could even walk. When the rescuers found me, they couldn’t say anything other than “mu-mu.” I understand them. It took three days to remove pieces of bodies from trees, and then suddenly see a living person,” the woman recalled.

By that time, all passengers of both aircraft declared dead. Larisa's relatives ordered a coffin and even, as she confessed, dug a grave. Months spent in hospitals, visits to the chiropractor, permanent procedures, long recovery period. Larisa still has pain in spring and autumn. She literally scratched her own right to a normal life.

Later in an interview, she recalled that shortly before the fateful flight she watched the film “Miracles Still Happen,” which tells the story of Juliana Kepke. I still don’t think about whether it was an omen.

“I didn’t fall into religion, or drunkenness, or depression. I love life. But sometimes I say, half-jokingly and half-seriously: “I am God’s favorite girl.” I live as I lived,” she said.

In 1985, Savitskaya gave birth to a son. Two months after giving birth, her mother died in a traffic accident. Larisa lived with her child on a single mother’s allowance, which at that time was 32 rubles. She reprinted texts and sold books. After perestroika, she opened a shoe sales company. Then she went to the Borjomi representative office. In the 90s, she was paralyzed due to injuries received during a fall. However, Larisa was able to recover from this and even got a job as an office manager in a real estate company.

She tries not to remember the catastrophe. But any plane crash that occurs in the world, as if returns it to the place of the tragedy. And she celebrates 24 August. As a second birthday.

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