Saved from disaster... three minutes late for flight

OUT of the Spanish tragedy came some amazing stories of sheer good luck.

One Spanish couple were three minutes late checking in and missed the flight.

Ertoma Bolanos said he learned of the crash when the family of his girlfriend Almudena called to say they had seen TV footage of it.

“We had no idea what had happened,” he told the newspaper La Vanguardia.

Nineteen people survived the crash of the Spanair MD-82 flight to the Canary Islands.

Twenty-two children and infants were listed as passengers — only three made it through the crash. The three children were all in a stable condition, with mostly minor injuries.

One of the 19 survivors recalled seeing bodies scattered everywhere as she escaped the burning wreckage.

“I lifted my head and all I saw were scattered bodies,” Ligia Palomino, a doctor, told El Pais newspaper.

Palomino said she was only semi-conscious after the crash but woke up when a fuel tank exploded.

Relatives gathered at an improvised morgue in a convention centre to identify the bodies, many of which were badly burnt.

“I’d kill the bastard who did this,” an angry driver shouted.

Firefighter Francisco Martinez told Reuters television that a wheel on his fire engine had caught fire in the extreme heat shed by the plane’s wreckage.

“I took a child into the truck and he thought he was in a film. But he asked ‘When will this film end?’ and ‘Where is my dad?’. He asked if it was real, if he was in a film, but he wanted the film to end,”said Martinez.

Ligia Palomino, 41, a doctor with Madrid’s Samur ambulance service, was rescued by her own colleagues, who could not hold back their tears as they attended her.

Palomino, who suffered a broken hip, described how she had boarded the flight with her husband, José, and sister-in-law, Gema.

They were going to celebrate Palomino’s 42nd birthday on the holiday island of Gran Canaria this Sunday.

“I heard a horrible noise as we were taking off and the next thing I remember was being flung from the aircraft. I must have passed out, but woke when there was a loud explosion.

“I called out ‘José!, José!’ and I saw a man near me, but the watch he was wearing was not my husband’s. I could hardly move but lifted my head and saw other bodies around me.

“I could feel the incredible heat from the wreckage. When the wind changed, I could hardly breathe. I had to protect my face with my arm.

“I heard people, including children crying for help,” she said. As a doctor she wanted to help but when she tried to get up she realised her thigh was broken.

As she eventually heard the sirens of emergency vehicles, she cried out again for José, but there was no response. When an ambulance crew reached her, they recognised her and cried.

Just before she went into surgery, Palomino was told that her husband, José, had been admitted to another hospital and that he was going to survive.

But no one could find her sister-in-law, Gema.