'I've had an accident, but I'm okay' - a survivor's tale

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article4580054.ece

Philippe Naughton

Beatriz Reyes Ojeda, a bank manager from the Canary Islands, telephoned her brother from flight JK5022 yesterday afternoon to tell him that her flight home was running late.
A few minutes later she called him again from amid the burning wreckage of the Spanair aircraft at Madrid's Barajas airport. "Hello," she said. "I've been in an accident, but I'm okay."
Beatriz's tale, the first from a survivor of yesterday's crash, was reported today in Canarias7, a local newspaper in Las Palmas where the Spanair flight was headed. Only 19 of the 172 passengers and crew on the flight survived and many of the victims, it emerged today, were islanders heading home after their summer holidays.
The 41-year-old was on her way home after a holiday in Johannesburg with two friends, whom she left in Madrid after a connecting flight from Frankfurt. She called her brother, Carlos, from the airport terminal to tell him that she was back in Spain and he could fetch her from the airport on Gran Canaria, 1,000 miles to the south, at about 4.30pm.
She called again from inside the plane after its first attempt at a take-off was aborted - for reasons which have yet to be explained - to tell her brother that she would definitely be late.
"After contacting her brother and disconnecting her mobile phone," the newspaper reported, "Beatriz could never have imagined what would hapen only a few minutes later."
Witness reports suggest that the port engine on the MD-82 caught fire as it left the runway, perhaps contributing to a catastrophic power failure. The plane lifted about 60 metres into the air before swerving to the right and coming down in a wooded area by the runway, breaking up as it hit the ground.
After the crash, Beatriz remained immobile in her seat as the smoke swirled around her and the sirens burst into life across the airport. She then undid her belt and clambered from the wreckage by herself despite a leg wound.
It was then that Pablo, the fireman, lent her his mobile so that she could call her family. She called her brother, said that she was safe, and rang off, leaving her brother, and sister Laura in Madrid, scrambling for news before he called the fireman back and was reassured that his sister was indeed alive.
Before she was taken to the Infanta Sofa hospital, Beatriz helped rescue two young children, but later told her sister that she had been unable to help an adult man escape the inferno because he was too heavy.
From her hospital bed last night, she told Laura what she remembered from the moments after the crash.
"I could see that something had happened to the plane. The other thing I can remember is lifting my head and seeing that the plane had no roof."