A couple of days before his colleague was due to fly to Cork on business, Larne businessman Laurence Wilson agreed to travel in his place. The flight he took was the ill-fated Manx2 jet which crash landed, killing six of the 12 people on board. He tells LAURA MURPHY what it felt like to survive
AS Laurence Wilson was pulled from the wreckage of the burning 19-seater Manx2 plane and urged to get onto a stretcher, he told his rescuers to stop for one second.
“I said, ‘I want to see this’,” recalls the Larne businessman, who survived - miraculously - with cuts and bruises, after the Cork-bound aircraft he was flying in crashed in dense fog, killing both the pilot and co-pilot, and four of the 10 passengers on board, on Thursday February 10 last year
“So I made them turn me round. I remember counting the windows and from the back I had been sitting beside the fourth window. Half of it you couldn’t see, it was in the mud.”
Just over a year on from the fatal crash that claimed the lives of four men from Northern Ireland, Laurence, a father-of-three from the small village of Gleno near Larne, describes himself as being “100 per cent” in terms of his mental and physical health.
And he says he is back to full form within the context of his role as co-director of Larne Skills Development Limited, a job that actually led him to being on that ill-fated flight from Belfast City Airport that morning.
“For the first couple of months (after the accident), I had an attitude of, ‘I don’t care about anything anymore’,” admits the 55-year-old.
“My colleague and me had a yarn and we actually employed a person to do a bit of my work. I said to Malachy (Delargy, his business partner), ‘I’m not firing on all cylinders here’, and there were days at two o’ clock I could have gone home - and before that I would have worked until nine o clock.”
Flight NM7 100 crashed and burst into flames when it failed to land on the main runway at Cork Airport at 9.52am - its third attempt, due to severely foggy conditions affecting the low lying airport terminal.
The Fairchild Metroliner III had left Belfast City Airport around an hour and 40 minutes earlier. After being forced to abort two attempted landings, 31-year-old Spanish pilot Jordi Sola Lopez tried to bring the aircraft down a third time. However the plane rolled to the left, then rapidly to the right, and its right wing tip hit the runway surface, sending it into a roll of 97 degrees, whereupon it flipped over and landed on grass before catching fire.
Both Captain Lopez and his British co-pilot, 27-year-old Andrew Cantle, both perished, together with passengers Richard Noble, 48, from Belfast, accountant Patrick Cullinan, 45, originally from Co Tyrone, businessman Brendan McAleese, 39, from Co Antrim, and harbour master Michael Evans, 51, from Belfast.
Like most of his fellow travellers, Laurence Wilson had been heading to Cork on business; he was due to give fork lift truck training to a company down there, as was part of the service his Co Antrim based business frequently delivered.
“There’s always a twist,” he laughs, revealing that it had actually been his colleague Steven Brown who was supposed to go to Cork that day - “and he hates flying!”
Steven had said he couldn’t find his passport; “I didn’t realise you even need a passport, a driving licence would have done!” laughs Laurence, who says that he agreed to go in his place in a last minute decision made literally a couple of days before the flight was due to leave.
The Larne man had no qualms about the journey, or indeed any plane trip, at all; as someone used to flying three or four times, a year, he “enjoyed the thrill of it.”
He adds: “As a matter of fact, I have a friend who has a part share in a plane and two or three summers ago, because he has to do so many hours to keep his pilot’s licence, got me into a four-seater and we flew all round the north. I really enjoyed it. But I don’t enjoy it now. I won’t be on a small plane again.”
On the morning of February 10, 2011, Laurence boarded the Manx2 plane and took his seat on the left hand side, just behind the wing - “I didn’t want to sit over the wing because I can’t see out” - close to the back of the aircraft. He was beside a lady called Heather Elliott, a Kinsale-born mum-of-two who was travelling to Cork to visit her mother for the weekend. They were the last two passengers to board.
“I remember Donal Walsh was at the very back,” he says, referring to the young Waterford man who also survived.
“Most of the passengers were in front of me.”
The Belfast skies that morning were, Laurence describes, like “pea soup”, with dense fog all around.
“As a matter of fact, months after the accident I was dealing with Shorts (Bombardier Aerospace). and one of the guys said that that particular morning had been the first time that he ever remembers not being able to see the ( Harland and Wolff) cranes from their plant, and they actually remarked on how foggy it was,” he adds.
Still, in spite of the ominous weather conditions, Laurence felt no fear.
“You didn’t know to be nervous, that’s the thing. You have faith in the pilots, and that they know what they’re doing, and that the plane has got the instrumentation to almost fly itself.”
When they were airborne, Laurence spent some time reading over a training manuel, before trying to take a nap. As the plane approached Cork, he felt it start to slow.
“I remember seeing the runway - just a wee glimpse through the fog. You know the way you’re waiting for the plane to come down? It never happened. But there was no dramatic dip out of there. I felt the plane turning and then going in for a second approach. At this stage, if somebody had said to me, ‘swear you have aborted the first landing’, I would have had to have thought about it.”
However the pilot’s second aborted landing proved to be much more unnerving. Every single passenger was all too aware of what was happening, as the plane’s engine’s burst with a surge of power as it began thrusting upwards to get back up above the foggy skies that were surrounding Cork Airport.
Unbelievably, Laurence recalls the skies at this height being clear and bright - “it was the nicest morning ever you saw” - and the sight of the heavy fog which had gathered in the “basin” that was the airport below.
One of the pilots made an announcement, which no one could hear above the drone of the engines, Laurence says. However, the word was passed along eventually that “we were going to do a 20-minute loop”, and “it was at that stage that people started to talk to each other.”
He remembers: “There was no sense of...you were going to die. We had aborted twice, so I knew myself it was not that good, but I wasn’t going to start and say, ‘I’m scared here’. I think all the men were - frightened is maybe the wrong word - but concerned.
“After the 20-minute loop, one of the pilots came out and put his thumbs up. He didn’t say go into a recovery position or put your head down - there was nothing like that. It was just thumbs up, we’re going for it, and we thought, ‘dead on, no problem’.
“So down in we went and at this stage I had squared up in my seat and was looking out, and had my leg stuck out in the aisle. I was looking out the window and the next thing, I saw grass - we would have been, I’m guessing, three or four metres from it.”
Laurence instinctively grabbed the seat in front of him, as the plane attempted to take off again. He remembers the sensation of the right wing of the aircraft clipping what he believed was grass - it was actually the runway, as the plane had landed to the left of it.
“We stumbled across and went right across to the other side and then nose-dived into the ground. I was upside down when it finished.”
As the plane impacted, its nose “ploughed into the ground and all the mud came up round us.”
It was - terrifyingly - as Laurence describes, a “buried alive job.”
He goes on: “Everybody says to me, ‘explain what that feels like.’
“It’s like being in the front bucket of a JCB, and somebody running it into the ground at 100 miles per hour. “All the chairs and everybody else kind of came in round you. When the call came to settle, I felt my head getting pushed and pushed down in between my legs. I couldn’t see, breathe or anything. You were completely encased in mud and that was the most horrific thing for me.”
One of his hands was jammed in the mud, and he used his other to claw at the earth which had encased him, until he could eventually feel air come in.
“I couldn’t see a thing,” he says.
“The next thing you could feel was all the water coming in round you. What had happened was as we hit the ground, the impact pushed all the water to the back of the plane like a tsunami, and as we got rid of the mud the water came in round us.
“There was a lot of squealing and stuff; it was pretty horrendous that part of it. Then you could hear the emergency services arrive almost straight away. Then I could hear Donal Walsh in the back screaming, ‘it’s on fire, it’s on fire’.”
Laurence continues to recount some of the horrifying images of the carnage all around him; the sight of his neighbour Heather as she looked as though she was losing consciousness (she survived), the sound of rescuers banging seats against the fuselage to get inside, and then wading, waist-deep in mud, to help the passengers. One rescuer had to get a knife to cut through the muck and release Laurence from his chair, as he was still held fast - upside down - by his seatbelt.
As he was finally pulled from the wreckage, he remembers seeing white fire-fighting foam all over the ground.
“I said to myself the whole time, ‘I’m going to keep completely calm, I’m going to note all that has happened’ - because I knew that some day somebody would ask me to give me a report on this. At that stage believed I was possibly the only survivor.”
And he adds that whilst there were a few terrifying moments during his fight for fresh air under the ground, he managed to steady himself, to force himself to absorb as much of the horror that had unfolded around him as he could.
The emergency services - whom Laurence says he and his fellow survivors owe their lives to - took him straight to Cork University Hospital, where the medical staff were “unbelievable.”
“They were just so efficient and so good,” he adds.
It was at this point that shock began to set in, as the businessman struggled to use a borrowed mobile phone to call his wife May and tell her he was alive. He was shaking so much he could barely key in the number.
“My wife went through as big a trauma as I did. For the first hour the whole talk was that everybody was dead and that was it. All my colleagues had ran up to the house (to tell her) - you can’t imagine what that would be like.”
He eventually got through to his work colleagues, “and there were squeals and yells”, before they contacted his wife, who was driven straight to Cork, along with the couple’s oldest daughter Emma, by a friend.
The aftermath of the crash saw Laurence experience a mishmash of emotions, including frustration with the seemingly continuous presence of the media on his doorstep, to the inevitable guilt that he had survived this trauma, whilst others had not.
He says that he and those people who lived to tell the tale have kept in touch, and Donal Walsh came and stayed with him for a week during the summer.
Some of them have managed to fly again, but Laurence doesn’t feel ready to take that step yet.
“Brendan Mallon (a Bangor man who survived the accident) has offered me the chance of going with him to sit in a plane etc. but that’s not me, if I’m going in a plane, I’m going in a plane.
“There are a couple of times I would have liked to have gone to London, but it was always the wee small planes, and I thought, ‘nope’ - I took the boat and the car and drove down. I’m not ready for it just yet.”
And while he says that he spent time, as anyone would, reliving the events in his head and questioning how the whole incident happened, he eventually reached the point where he had to draw a line under it.
“I honestly don’t blame the pilots at all. I don’t feel any bitterness towards anybody,” he adds.