LE GALAWA BEACH, Comoro Islands - An American diplomat on board the Ethiopian airliner that crashed near the Comoro Islands after a hijacking spoke Sunday of how he had thought he and his wife were going to die, but managed to survive.
"I thought I was dead when we hit the water," said Franklin Huddle, the U.S. consul general in Bombay.Huddle, 53, said he and his wife, who had been sitting next to him, managed to swim free of the wreck-age and headed for the nearest windsurfer which they clung onto until they were taken to shore.
Huddle and his wife had been seated in business class in the front of plane, which ripped apart in front of them when the aircraft crash-landed some 500 yards offshore from the Hotel Le Galawa Saturday.
The couple had been heading for Nairobi, the plane's next scheduled stop after Addis Ababa, for a game park holiday.
Officials said 123 people are feared dead in the crash that occurred after the Boeing 767, which took off from Addis Ababa and was bound for Abidjan, with a stop in Nairobi, ran out of fuel and crashed into the Indian Ocean where it broke into three pieces.
The plane was hijacked by three men, two of whom are known to have survived. The motives of the hijackers are unknown.
Speaking from his stretcher on board a French military Transall which was taking 16 of the wounded to the French island of Reunion, Huddle said the plane had flown south for a long way before swinging to the north and then the east.
"That puzzled me. I thought they were taking us to east Zaire where the problems are. Ten minutes before we went down, the pilot said: 'We have lost one engine. We are running out of fuel. We are going to have a crash landing. Get ready'."
Huddle said that one of the three hijackers then ran up the plane's aisle to the cockpit shouting "sit, sit" to the passengers. Other witnesses said a struggle ensued in the cockpit.
Huddle said he used to pilot a small Cessna jet.
"But I knew what happens when a big plane goes down," he said. "The chances of surviving are like today - with about 50 survivors and 120 killed.
"When the plane hit the water, it hit gently. there were a couple of good-sized lurches but not too violent, and then a hard swerve." On impact with the water the plane broke in two.
Huddle said the hijacking itself had been "not too bad."
"They were not high-tech hijackers - threatening types in the Middle East style. They let you get up to pee. But they were terrorists and they did not let the pilot communicate with us."