Celebrity
Plane Crash Survivor Annette Herfkens Opens Up About Her Journey From Tragedy To Triumph
Annette Herfkens was living the good life in 1992.
She had a flourishing job, a passionate love life, and the entire world at her feet as a Wall Street trader.
But things suddenly took a horrifying turn when she and the man she loved boarded a plane.
Annette Herfkens, who was born in the Netherlands, was whisked away on what was supposedly the perfect romantic getaway thirty-three years ago.
After 13 years of dating, her long-time companion William persuaded her to take a much-needed vacation from their busy lives.
Annette was a trader, and William was the manager of Internationale Nederlanden Bank’s Vietnam branch. They eventually made time for one another after working in different nations for six arduous months.
They intended for this trip to be a reunion, an opportunity to re-connect and rejuvenate. The strategy? For sun, sand, and peace, begin in the vibrant city of Ho Chi Minh City and go to the idyllic seaside resort of Nha Trang.
However, their trip aboard Vietnam Airlines Flight 474 would take a disastrous turn for them and the other 23 passengers.
A gut feeling before takeoff
On November 14, 1992, Annette Herfkens, a lifetime claustrophobe, experienced a surge of dread as she boarded the Yakovlev Yak-40. She and her fiancé were to go to the sunny beaches of Nha Trang in an ancient Soviet-built jet.
In an attempt to calm her, her partner, whom she referred to as “Pasje,” told her a white lie: the flight would only take 20 minutes.
However, terror struck when forty minutes had gone by and they were still in the air.
“Pasje looked at me with fear. ‘Of course, a shitty little toy plane drops like this!’ I said, reaching for his hand. ‘It’s just an air pocket — don’t worry.’ But he was right to worry. We dropped again. Someone screamed. It went pitch-black. Seconds later, we made impact,” Herfkens recalled to the New York Post.
Waking up in a nightmare
The Vietnamese forest raged all around her when she came to.
Over her was the body of a stranger. Van der Pas was nearby, still strapped into his seat, smiling and still. Lost.
“That’s where you have fight or flight,” she said. “I definitely chose flight,” Annette told The Guardian.
Her memories of escaping the wreckage are a blur. “It must have been excruciating pain to get out of there,” she said. “So I must have crawled out of the plane and lifted myself down. And then I must have crawled another 30 yards.”
She suffered severe injuries, including a collapsed lung, a broken leg, a shattered hip, and bone sticking out of her jaw. However, she was still alive. Not by themselves, either.
Surrounded by the dead
Because Annette wasn’t the only one who survived the crash in the early hours.
Annette heard cries and moans. Even after her skirt ripped, a Vietnamese businessman handed her clothes. But the voices gradually faded into stillness, one by one.
Before long, the dead were all around her.
To survive, she used yoga breathing to manage her lung injury — “mindfulness before we all knew the word,” she called it.
She used insulation from the plane’s wings to collect rainwater, but she tore her elbows so badly that skin grafts were eventually necessary.
“Every two hours I would take a sip,” she said. “And then—I congratulated myself. And that also makes you survive.”
The world thought she was gone
Families back home were in mourning. The paper published her obituary. A letter of condolence was sent by her supervisor. However, Jaime Lupa, a close friend and coworker, persisted.
“When I promised Annette’s father before I left: ‘I will bring your daughter back alive,’ he became furious,” Lupa said. “‘You are an idiot,’ he exclaimed. ‘Get real!’”
Herfkens sensed her own disappearance on the seventh day. On the seventh day, however, a miracle occurred.
Arriving with only corpse bags were a Vietnamese police officer and his squad.
They were surprised to see anyone still alive.
A new life after tragedy
Herfkens was taken on a handmade stretcher down the mountain and brought home. She arrived in a wheelchair to attend her fiancé’s funeral in December. She started to walk by New Year’s. She returned to her career in banking in February 1993.
But sorrow persisted. Anger boiled up. Her traumatic experiences persisted.
She had two kids, Joosje and Max, and married Jaime Lupa, the friend who had promised to bring her home, years later. She created a new life while clinging to the forest that almost killed her, even though the pair eventually got divorced.
“If you accept what’s not there, then you see what is there,” she said. “I accepted that I was not with my fiancé on the beach… Once I accepted that, I saw what was there – and it was this beautiful jungle.”
Her book Turbulence: A True Story of Survival was based on her motto.
“You learn from taking losses”
Annette, who went on to become an inspirational speaker, feels that instinct, not chance, saved her life.
“I was the youngest child – I grew up with a lot of love – but I was left alone. I didn’t have parents telling me what I should do and feel. So I developed instincts,” she said.
She even suspects undiagnosed ADHD helped her become “inventive and charming” as a kid. “If I had had Ritalin as a kid, I would never have developed the qualities I had for surviving the jungle,” she added.
When her son Max was diagnosed with autism, she used the same survival mindset: “You have to mourn what’s not there,” she said. “But focus on what is there. With my son, that’s what I did.”
She made connections with parents from other backgrounds, joined inclusive communities, and even brought Max on “dry runs” to the police station as a precaution.
“There were many black autistic boys in our circle, and it was so important to the mothers to teach them that when the police came, they had to keep their hands out of their pockets,” she said.
Still counting the days
Herfkens commemorates the crash’s eight-day anniversary every year. She takes a sip of water. She purchases a gift for herself.
“I like treating myself,” she says with a smile. “I’m good at that.”
She never really recovered from her tragedy. On aeroplanes, she stays away from sitting behind other people. Even now, Vietnamese cuisine might bring back memories. However, she has continued to live.
Hollywood executives, who wanted to make it more about her, were unable to fully comprehend her narrative.
“I really think that why I survived is because I got over myself,” she said. “You get over your little self, then you get your instinct to work, then you achieve stuff.”
The woods, where she lost everything, is her haven to this day.
“It has been my ‘safe place’ ever since,” she explained.
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