The Melbourne Age newspaper (17 March 2018) supplement "Good Weekend" published the story of Cynthia Banham who survived the 2007 Yogyakarta Garuda Boeing 737 crash that killed 21 others but lost her marathon-running legs in the process. At the time of the accident, she was a respected journalist; the foreign affairs and defence correspondent for
The Sydney Morning Herald.
In the article she described how she and other passengers noticed something was wrong; the plane was approaching the runway too fast. People started shouting and Banham grabbed her arm-rests. "screams were rising in my throat." she writes, "but I was so panicked-also so unbelieving-the full sound would not come out.
The airliner bounced twice, overran the runway, crossed a road and hit an embankment, finally coming to rest in a paddy field. The cockpit was folded back on top of the forward passenger cabin, where Banham was sitting. She thinks she briefly passed out. When she regained consciousness, she became aware that the seat in front of her had collapsed onto her, and the cabin was alight. She couldn't see the fire but she heard it crackling. Then she realised her left leg was burning. Of the 140 people on the plane, 21 were killed.
That was just eleven years ago this March. One wonders how many current Pprune readers would have read about that accident and learned the important lesson from it that pressing on with an unstable approach instead of going around again, can lead to disaster. It also reveals the danger on the flight deck of a `Real men don't go around` ethnic culture that pervades in some aviation societies.
Read the report:
https://aviation-safety.net/database...?id=20070307-0
Full Report:
http://knkt.dephub.go.id/knkt/ntsc_a...%20Release.pdf