Hotmail‘Miracle’ jet crash survivor welcomed home
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 | Girl survives plane crash July 1: French and U.S. aircraft joined the hunt on Wednesday for possible survivors from a plane that crashed off Comoros. ITN's Bill Neely reports. Nightly News |
'She was a bit panicked'
Joyandet said the girl recounted her ordeal a bit to him.
"She says instructions were given to passengers and that then she felt something like electricity ... as if she had been a bit electrocuted," Joyandet said. "And suddenly there was this big sound. She found herself in the water."
"She said she was afraid when she couldn't see her mama," her father said on France-24. "She was a bit panicked."
At one point, he said, Bahia fell asleep, clinging to a piece of debris.
The French air accident investigation agency BEA sent a team of investigators and Airbus experts to Comoros, an archipelago of three main islands 1,800 miles south of Yemen, between Africa's southeastern coast and the island of Madagascar.
France's transport minister, Dominique Bussereau, was quoted as saying Thursday in the Le Figaro daily that "worrying anomalies" in the crashed Airbus A310 jet included broken seats for crew and passengers, out-of-date operation manuals, insufficient pressure on emergency exit doors and unrestrained equipment in the baggage hold. French aviation authorities flagged the problems with the plane during a 2007 inspection.
Yemenia's lawyer in France, however, said it was too early to say that the plane's condition was the cause of the accident.
'No bodies'
Off the coast of the Comoros islands, French and U.S. ships directed the search for survivors, bodies and wreckage Thursday, even as hope in finding anyone alive in the choppy seas faded.
"Up to this moment, there have been no bodies, nor any other survivor," said Jean Youssouf, director-general of El Maarouf Hospital in Moroni. "Do we continue to hope to find survivors? Yes, we will continue to hope."
Tales of sole survivors of plane crashes are rare, but not unheard of.
In 2006, only Martin Farkas survived when Slovak military plane went down in northeastern Hungary, killing 42 people. And in 1987, 4-year-old Cecelia Cichan was the only survivor when an American Northwest Airlines flight crashed while trying to take off from Detroit, killing 156 people.
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