Plane crash survivor Liliana Estrada has revealed chilling details of how she lived through the Lahnsa Airlines disaster that left 12 people dead and four others injured in Honduras.
Speaking to DailyMail.com from her home in the northern Caribbean port city of La Ceiba on Monday, the 25-year-old explained how her life was likely saved by the position of her seat in the small aircraft.
She described how the Jetstream 32 had two rows down either side of the plane, one row with one seat and the other with two seats.
By luck, the contractor for Minnesota-based freight auditor Navix said she selected the single seat on the left side of the plane – opposite an exit door.
‘I was sitting right on the wing of the plane. I think that was one of the ways I was able to get out when the plane fell and split in two,’ she said. ‘According to what I’ve been told, I got out; I took off my seatbelt myself and was able to swim,’ she added.
Estrada was leaving the island of Roatán on March 17 after spending the weekend with her boyfriend.
For unknown reasons, the flight from José Manuel Gálvez International Airport was delayed by almost an hour before it eventually departed at 6:28 pm local time. It barely got airborne before crashing 328 feet off the edge of the runway at 6:30 pm.
As the plane wreckage began to sink into the Caribbean Sea, Estrada managed to get out on her own before she was rescued by two fishermen.
Pictured: Honduras National Airlines Jetstream-32 that crashed in Roatán, Honduras on March 17
Liliana Estrada told DailMail.com she was seated by the wing of the Lahnsa Airlines plane that crashed in Roatán, Honduras on March 17 and claimed the lives of two crew members and 10 passengers. Estrada said she was able to remove her seatbelt and swam away from the aircraft that split in two parts after crashing in the Caribbean Sea
Liliana Estrada told DailyMail.com that she booked a flight with Lahnsa Airlines on March 17 because all other flights were sold out and she had to be back home the next day to work – she is contracted by Navix, a Minnesota-based freight auditing company
‘Honestly, I can’t give you much detail about that because I don’t remember exactly how I got out due to the bumps and bruises I have. I don’t remember,’ she said.
Cell phone video footage of the rescue shows first responders carrying her off the rock-filled shore and up a hill towards a police pickup truck, where they placed her body on the flatbed as she screamed in pain.
Estrada underwent surgery to treat a fractured pelvis and was discharged Saturday.
‘I’ll be bedridden for at least eight weeks, unable to get up. Thank God, I’ve been able to cope with the pain. It’s not easy. It’s not easy at all, to be honest, because it’s not easy to be bedridden 24/7, needing help even to eat,’ she said.
Estrada also suffered a second fracture in another part of her pelvis and a fracture in her spine, but both did not require operations because the doctor found that the injuries could heal on their own.
‘Even the spinal fracture was very delicate, down to the millimeters,’ she said. ‘It’s true that only God could have put his hand there. I wasn’t paralyzed.’
Five people were injured and 12 were killed after a Lahnsa Airlines Jetstream 32 crashed off the coast of Roatán, Honduras on March 17
Liliana Estrada told DailyMail.com that she had surgery for a fractured pelvis and also suffered a fracture in the spine that was just ‘millimeters’ from leaving her paralyzed
According to Estrada, it was the first time she had flown with Lahnsa Airlines since 2024. The flight to Roatán was booked with Sosa Airlines, another regional carrier.
Estrada slammed the conditions of the fleet of planes that Lahnsa Airlines operates across the region.
‘This airline [Sosa] generally has planes in very good condition, and I understand they actually inspect them. I’ve been able to confirm this because you can definitely feel the difference,’ she said.
‘I’ve flown on Lahnsa before. I hadn’t flown on Lahnsa since last year until this year. The other times I’ve flown, I could tell that the planes were definitely neglected,’ Estrada said. ‘Many of them don’t even have air conditioning. I know these are planes that are very old and don’t have regular maintenance.’
Her comments come after she posted a video on her social media over the weekend and criticized Lahnsa Airlines for exposing the two flight crew members and 15 passengers to dangerous flying conditions.
‘I also want to make it clear that the plane was already having problems before it even took off,’ said Estrada, who texted her boyfriend that ‘something’ was about to go wrong when the plane skidded before taking off.
‘The plane was leaving at 5:40 pm, and they told us they were going to be 25 minutes late, which wasn’t the case; it was more than 25 minutes late. They didn’t explain why,’ Estrada said. ‘They simply told us it was a delay and put us on the plane, knowing full well the odds that we wouldn’t make it.’
The tragedy claimed the lives of the pilot, Luis Araya, the co-pilot, Francisco Lagos, and 10 passengers, including Honduran musician and politician Aurelio Martínez, 56, a famous figure in the Garifuna music scene, who held dual Honduran-American citizenship.
Santos Guardiola Fire Department captain Franklin Borjas told reporters that the small plane made a right turn before crashing.
He said that the accident may have been caused by a failure in the aircraft’s motor.
Lanhsa Airlines has said it will cover the medical and funeral expenses for the victims.
According to aviation experts, the possibility of surviving a plane crash could be higher for those passengers who opt for seating the rear of the aircraft.
Over the past eight decades there have only been 18 fatal commercial flights carrying at least 80 passengers that left behind survivors in their wrecks.
‘There are a lot of reasons someone may survive in what appears to be a totally unsurvivable situation,’ Barbara Dunn, the president of the International Society of Air Safety Investigators, told the Wall Street Journal.
‘Depending on how the aircraft lands and where a passenger is seated has an impact,’ she continued. ‘If you have your seatbelt tightened, it limits the amount of flailing the body goes through. It also depends on whether the passenger is able to assume a brace position.’
Where you sit on a plane isn’t the only factor that comes into play for potential survival.
Although the back of the aircraft may be relatively safer, where the plane touches down is one of the biggest factors that tie in – passengers in the front of a nose-first crash bear the brunt of the force.
‘A lot of people think it’s safer in the back than in the front,’ Dunn added. ‘Not necessarily.’
‘How quick the fire takes over and how quick you can get to an exit, all those things matter as well.’
Two people people survived a Jeju Air crash that left 179 occupants dead in 2024.
There were also two survivors and 97 people dead in a 2020 Pakistan International Airlines accident in Pakistan.
‘When you here survivable, you’d think people survived, and when you hear non-survivable, you’d think everybody dies,’ Anthony T. Brickhouse, an expert in aerospace safety, told WSJ.
‘We’ve had people survive what we would call nonsurvivable crashes and we’ve also had people die in what we would call survivable crashes.’
