Switching Seats Saved Crash Survivors

Boarding the Singapore Airlines jet that was supposed to fly her home, Deborah Brosnan asked a stewardess if she and her husband could switch seats from the middle of the plane to the back, so they could stretch out and sleep on the 15-hour flight.

At first, the stewardess said the plane was too full, but then changed her mind and moved them farther back.

That tiny event may very well have saved their lives.

Hurtling down a pitch-black runway in a driving rainstorm last Tuesday in Taipei, Taiwan, the Boeing 747-400 smashed into construction equipment and broke into three pieces, one of the breaks coming roughly where Brosnan and her husband, Steven Courtney, were originally supposed to have been sitting.

"I don't know if it was luck or fate or fortune, or who was watching out for us," Brosnan told a news conference Tuesday at Legacy Emanuel Hospital, her husband sitting next to her in a wheelchair wearing a yellow hospital smock. "Where we ended up, we were much further back...which is what saved our lives."

Brosnan, 43, and Courtney, 45, are biologists and head the Sustainable Ecosystems Institute in Portland. They were flying home from Bali, where they had been attending a symposium on coral reefs.

Settled in their seats, Brosnan looked out the window at the heavy rain and winds so strong the plane's wings were moving up and down and thought to herself, "There's no lights. It's pitch black. Not even a glow."

When the pilot came on to tell everyone to fasten their seatbelt, his message was curt and made Brosnan feel very nervous at a time she normally enjoys.

"I gripped the sides of the seat," she said. "It felt like we were just about to take off. And suddenly the plane went gee-boom. And it took off again, slammed back down, and I remember thinking, 'This can't be happening.'

"The panels on the ceiling started to fall down and just float through the air. Everything started to collapse all around us. I remember thinking, `This is it. I'm going to die. People don't survive plane crashes.'

"The next thing I knew, we were being thrown around. Steven described it as a roller coaster ride, which is exactly what it was. Something sucked me out of my seat and threw me across the plane. It was the plane turning on its side. I landed flat on my back against the window."

She looked up and saw a fireball move across the passenger compartment where she was originally supposed to be sitting. Flames and smoke were moving towards her.

"I thought, this is it. I'm going to die. I remember thinking, `I wonder what it would be like to be burned to death. And hearing the crackling get louder. I just curled up into a ball like this and I waited for the flames to come."

Courtney was thinking the same thing as he watched the flames coming toward him.

"One of the consequences of the plane having tilted on to its side was that the exit door was actually jammed against he ground. So, we could find the exit door. It was impossible to open. And there were in fact flames underneath it, and so there were flames underneath us as we were walking around. Then we tried to go forward, we tried to go back. The only other exit we knew of was thirty, forty feet above us on the other side of the plane. And it was clear that we weren't going to get out of that."

But the flames never reached them. The fuselage split apart, and Brosnan and Courtney were in the tail section that skidded away. She got up and soon found her husband and they gave each other a big hug. Then smoke started coming in, and Brosnan thought she had escaped the flames only to die in the smoke.

"I started thinking about my kids, who are grown up. My son is at the Coast Guard Academy and my daughter went to college. The kids are OK. If I was going to die, maybe this is an OK time."

"I tease him about never stopping to ask directions," Brosnan said. "This time he said, `You know we all need to go forward. He got us all into line. He said, `Right, just keep moving forward."

They walked past passengers hanging from their seats, their seatbelts still buckled.

"They were like bats," Brosnan said. "We tried to get them down, but they didn't want to get down. Most of them were just frozen."

They reached a bulkhead, which they had to climb over, then squeezed out through a hole in the fuselage into howling winds, driving rain and pitch darkness.

Running across some grass, they nearly fell into a culvert. They had to climb down into it, wade across a waist-deep torrent of water, and climb out the other side. In the distance they saw a white airport bus. When they called to it, the bus turned around and picked them up. Brosnan and Courtney helped other survivors get on board.

Inside the terminal, Brosnan asked a person behind the first counter she came to if she could use the phone, but was told she could not unless she had a calling card.

Then the people at the nearby UPS counter ushered them into their offices and covered them with blankets and spare shirts.

While Courtney was treated for burns in a local hospital, Brosnan arranged for them to fly home. When she looked at the ticket Singapore Airlines had given her, and where her name was supposed to be, it said, "Survivor."

"I looked at that, and thought, `Well, that's either survivor as in somebody who's in a bad state, or survivor: somebody who made it out. We did survive through luck and good fortune and somebody looking out for us."

"I think it'll have a huge impact on us. I'm pretty sure it will. What I'm hoping is that the impact it has is to make us feel lucky and happy and to cherish each moment more than we might have,"said Bronson.

©2000 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed