On November 14, 1992, Annette Herfkens, an international bond trader on Wall Street, and her fiance Willem van der Pas (Pasje) boarded Vietnam Airlines flight 474 in Ho Chi Minh City. They were just two young people in love that planned a romantic getaway to the coastal resort of Nha Trang.
They had no idea that their dreams would be soon shattered forever in a fateful plane crash that would take the lives of twenty-three passengers and six crew members.
It is believed that the pilot made a navigation error and that the suddenly changing weather contributed to creating extreme turbulence causing the crew to lose control over the aircraft. The plane struck the ridge of the mountain. It lost one wing, but it was still flying until it finally crashed into the next mountain.
The plane crashed nineteen miles from Nha Trang and ten miles from the nearest village. Very soon Annette realized that she was the sole survivor of that fateful crash – her fiance was dead, so were the rest.
Read our interview with the author – https://enlightenmentmedianews.com/a-survival-story-interview-with-annette-herfkens-the-sole-survivor-of-the-plane-crash-in-vietnam-2/
About the author: Annette Herfkens was born in Venezuela to a Dutch family. She was raised in the Netherlands, where she studied law at Leiden University. After completing an internship in Santiago, Chile, she became a management trainee for ING Bank, eradicating professional barriers as the first female executive to be sent abroad by a Dutch bank. She was assigned first to New York, then to London, and in 1989 accepted an offer from Banco Santander to help set up the Emerging Markets Department in Madrid. She went back to work just a few months after the airplane crash in 1992 and was promoted to Managing Director one year later. In 1996 she was appointed to Santander’s office in New York City.
By writing “Turbulence”, Annette broke some barriers of her own: The book helped her finally share the spiritual ramifications of her experience and how she used intuition, focus, and consciousness to guide her.
She also writes and speaks about the gains that come with loss. She is an accidental expert in the field: Nine years after she lost her fiancé in the crash, her son was diagnosed with autism. Just as in the jungle, she focuses on the beauty of what is.
Annette is currently living a hopeful life in New York City with her family
Available on amazon.com – Turbulence: A True Story of Survival
