A Danish couple were among the survivors when a small passenger plane from airline Agni Air crashed this morning in the high altitude airport of Jomsom in northeast Nepal.
29-year-old Emilie Jørgensen and her boyfriend Andreas Rasch told tabloid Ekstra Bladet how the low-flying plane crashed when its wing struck the mountain.
“We were thrown about,” Jørgensen said. “All the seats came apart and we got stuck between seats and bodies. There wasn’t much panic but you could hear people crying.”
A representative of the Danish embassy in the Nepal capital of Kathmandu is on their way to the hospital where the two Danes are being treated, according to the Foreign Ministry.
There were 21 people onboard the Dornier plane, consisting of two pilots and a steward from Nepal along with 16 Indian and two Danish passengers.
Thirteen Indian passengers and the two pilots were killed in the crash, while the two Danes and the Nepali steward were among the six survivors. Soldiers from a nearby barracks helped the rescue effort and helped airlift eight passengers to a hospital in the nearby tourist town of Pokhara, though two died on the way.
Jomsom Airport is notorious for being one of the world's most dangerous due to its 2,800 metre altitude, tricky descent and bad weather. The crash is the second in two years for Agni Air after a plane carrying tourists to Mount Everest crashed and killed all 14 onboard in August 2010.
The news of the two Danes' miraculous survival arrived after more unfortunate news this weekend regarding two Danish men on the Spanish Canary Islands.
One 41-year-old man was found dead on Saturday after apparently falling down some cliffs while a 51-year-old man is still missing after his rucksack and bicycle were found near a dam.
