A family due to travel on Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 recounted how they felt ‘physically sick’ to discover their close brush with death after the plane was shot down.
A decade ago today (July 17, 2014), a Boeing 777-200ER was set to travel from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur with 283 passengers and 15 crew members onboard.
However, Flight MH17 never made it to its destination as it was shot down by Russian forces around 50 kilometres from Ukraine’s border with the country.
The incident saw all 298 people on board being killed after a Buk ground-to-air missile struck the plane, according to the Ukrainian interior ministry.
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Three men have since been found guilty of the 2014 attack and have been sentenced to life in prison.
A trio who narrowly avoided being caught up in the disaster were Izzy Sim, her husband Barry and their young child.
It’s said that the family were due to catch Flight MH17 to Kuala Lumpur but had been denied access after being told by officials to switch to another flight.
Speaking to The Telegraph at the time, Izzy claimed this was because there were too few seats available onboard the Malaysia Airlines plane.
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Instead, they were shifted to a KLM flight which would arrive in Kuala Lumpur the next day.
The family were on their way to Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport in a taxi when they found out about the disaster.
Speaking to the publication ten years ago, Izzy said: “I'm shaken. I don't even know what to do. I feel physically sick.
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"I was coming from the Hilton [hotel] in The Hague to the airport in the taxi and I was just crying.”
"I'm just thinking that I feel like I've been given a second chance, so hopefully we will get there [to Malaysia] safely and we will see my family again,” she added.
Discussing his thoughts and feelings, Barry claimed he felt ‘sick’ to hear about his family’s brush with death but that the disaster wouldn’t stop him from flying again.
“In my mind lightning never strikes twice in the same place, so I am still philosophical that you get on the flight and you go about your life," he said.
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Following Flight MH17 being shot down, an inspection of the wreckage site discovered that most of the bodies either weren’t wearing clothes or had the majority of them torn or ripped off.
A man who was helping to clear up the debris revealed that this phenomenon was due to the plane depressurising, causing people to fall out of it while it crashed back down to Earth.
"Some bodies were naked. The clothes got torn off them. We've been finding them and the clothes too,” he told Vice.
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"We found bodies in seats, they were falling with their seats."
Aviation safety expert Alan Diehl echoed the man’s comments, telling Daily Intelligencer that missing clothes was a sign that passengers were ‘ejected from the plane or exposed to extreme wind blasts’.
“The effect of very high-speed wind, or the slipstream, hitting the bodies can easily literally rip the clothing right off,” the former United States Air Force investigator continued.
Furthermore, he added that these people probably weren’t conscious when being thrown out of the plane because of the ‘rapid decompression’.
“The G-forces of the aeroplane spinning around probably meant, mercifully, that most of these people weren’t conscious on the way down,” Alan said.
Topics: Crime, Travel, World News
Ella Scott