Gadget Maven Blog

Several amazing things happened this week.
The first was an one-in-a-million accident, followed by a remarkable display of heroism by a group of South African geeks who went for a day of extreme sports and got a whole lot more adrenaline.
Then another amazing thing happened: Twitter took off as a news tip-off service, resulting in a front page story for The Times newspaper, the South African national newspaper for which I write a column.
Here’s what happened:First a light aircraft crashed head-on into a bakkie [pick up truck] in a freak accident near Krugersdorp Airport, west of Johannesburg, around 2pm. Amazingly no-one was killed and the pilot and passenger only suffered light injuries.
Then, the group of friends dragged the two men from the burning plane, moments before it was engulfed into flames.The remarkable accident happened just after the two-seater Pyper Cherokee took off, hitting the bakkie head-on and bursting into flames.
A group of Johannesburg internet and media professionals – including Nic Haralambous, Craig Rodney, Rich Mulholland, Mike Stopforth, Don Packett, Riccardo Webb, Nic Jackson and several others – were freebording with Jono Herbst, who runs a company called Pure Rush. Freeboarding is an extreme sport which is similar to snowboarding but uses a skateboard on a steep tarred hill.
Their friends Monica Braganca and Anna Vaulina were driving a pick-up truck, or bakkie as it’s known in South Africa, down the hill to collect them when the accident happened.
“The plane was flying straight towards the bakkie when it dipped and recovered, then dipped again. It was literally heading straight for us,” Vaulina told this reporter shortly after the accident.
“The plane hit the ground first, about five to 10 metres from us, and then it bounced straight into the bakkie.”She added: “There was a split second in my mind when I thought we were going to die. It felt like in a movie. Things like this don’t happen to you. We’re all very, very lucky.”
Braganca, who was driving, said: “We saw the plane coming down, I honestly didn’t think it would crash and it would pull up. When it hit the ground, I just closed my eyes and kept my foot on the brakes and braced myself. We pretty much saw it coming.
“I think we were very lucky we were in the car we were – a Ford Ranger bakkie, with a bull bar. I am going to go out and buy myself a 4×4 now.”
The plane burst into flames but the impact had buckled the doors, so both women climbed out the windows. A passenger was thrown from the back. All were unhurt, and the two women were later treated for shock.
Meanwhile, Haralambous, Rodney, Mulholland, Stopforth, Packett, Webb and Jackson, led by Herbst, were heralded as heroes by Braganca and Vaulina. “The Pure Rush guys were brilliant,” Vaulina added.
The friends saw the accident and ran up the hill to help the plane’s occupants escape.
Vaulina said: “They were running around, covered in blood, it was very heroic.”
She added: “I take my hat off to the guys. Everyone was petrified that at any second [the plane] was going to explode.”
“It was surreal,” Rodney told me later. “Nic, Jono [Herbst from Pure Rush] and I were the first guys there. I felt like a was running towards a movie screen. [In a situation like this] your only frame of reference is movies.”
“Nic told me afterwards he couldn’t believe he was running towards a plane on fire. We kept thinking: ‘Am I in a f__king movie?’”
Haralambous said when they got to the plane its engine and the cockpit were already on fire. Both occupants were covered in blood: the first person they helped out had numerous facial injuries and splattered Haralambous and the others with blood.
Haralambous said: “I started shouting at the guy who I was helping: ‘Move, you need to move.’ We had to move them three or four times. We were all so exhausted and we were worried about their injuries. The guy I was helping kept saying ‘my back, my neck’.”
They moved the men three or times, very cautiously, “four of us moved one guy at a time.”
The plane set the neighbouring veld on fire, which quickly spread up the hill to where the friends’ car were parked. Some of the party moved the cars back, before they could be engulfed in flames.
About 10 minutes later the police, emergency services and paramedics arrived.
After the initial excitement, Rodney sent the first of several messages and pictures taken with his iPhone to Twitter, the hugely popular micro-blogging service. The others followed and thousands viewed their pictures and videos.

More stories, pictures and videos:

• To read the front page article in The Times, click here.
• To read my article on how Twitter came of age, click here.
• To see Craig Rodney’s pictures immediately after the plane crash, click here and here.
• To see Riccardo Webb’s videos of the aftermath, click here and here.
• To see Riccardo Webb’s pictures of the plane on fire and the mangled bakkie, click here.
• To read Mike Stopforth’s account of the day, click here.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 9:36 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.