She Was 12 When the Plane Crashed Into the Sea. She Was the Only Survivor to Spend the Night in the Ocean

There were 153 people on board. Bahia was twelve years old and could barely swim. Yet she was the only person to survive the crash. She found herself alone in the darkness of the ocean, clinging to a piece of wreckage and waiting to see whether anyone would find her. At that moment, no one knew that a little girl was still alive among the wreckage and bodies.

A Journey to Visit Family

Bahia Bakari was born in France, while her family came from the Comoros Islands. In the summer of 2009, she and her mother, Aziza, set out to visit relatives. Their journey began in Paris.

The flight first took them to Marseille and then continued to Sana'a, the capital of Yemen.

There, Bahia and her mother transferred to another aircraft. The final leg of their journey would take them to Moroni, the capital of the Comoros.

Bahia was sitting beside her mother. For a twelve-year-old girl, this was not an adventure or an unusual journey. It was simply a trip to see family.

The aircraft was an Airbus A310. It had entered service in 1990 and had already been flying for almost two decades when the accident occurred.

There were 142 passengers and 11 crew members on board.

A total of 153 people.

Shortly before landing, the weather deteriorated.

It was night.

And the aircraft was approaching the Comoros Islands.

Something Was Wrong

Bahia later recalled feeling turbulence shortly before the crash.

The aircraft was shaking.

She was not an experienced traveler who could have recognized exactly what was happening. Turbulence can be frightening for a child, but it is also something passengers occasionally experience during a flight.

This time, however, something was different.

In later interviews, Bahia described seeing the aircraft shake. She said the situation seemed strange to her, although nobody around her appeared to react as though an immediate disaster was about to happen.

Then came the moment she could not explain.

During its approach, the aircraft got into serious trouble and crashed into the ocean shortly before 2 a.m.

Within seconds, the huge passenger aircraft had become wreckage scattered across the surface of the Indian Ocean.

And Bahia disappeared into the darkness.

“Suddenly, I Was in the Water”

Bahia could not remember everything that happened at the moment of impact.

Later, she described suddenly finding herself in the water.

She did not know how she had gotten there.

She could not see her mother.

She did not know where the aircraft was or where the other passengers were.

It was dark.

Completely dark.

And all around her was the ocean.

Bahia was not wearing a life jacket. She also could not swim well.

Yet somehow she managed to grab onto a piece of wreckage.

It was not a heroic or carefully calculated decision.

It was the instinctive reaction of someone desperately trying not to drown.

She held on.

And she did not let go.

Later, she said that during the first moments she could hear voices around her.

Other people were calling out.

Some were screaming for help.

But Bahia could not see them.

She could only hear voices in the darkness.

Then, one by one, the voices disappeared.

And the ocean gradually fell silent.

Suddenly, She Was Alone

This may be the most frightening part of her story.

Immediately after the crash, Bahia could still believe there were other people around her.

She could hear voices and imagine that someone would come to rescue them.

Then the voices stopped.

Bahia was alone.

A twelve-year-old girl in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

Without a life jacket.

Without a boat.

Without food.

Without water.

And, most importantly, without knowing whether anyone was even looking for her.

Above her was the black sky.

Below her was the deep ocean.

She held on to a piece of wreckage.

And waited.

The water was rough and the wind was strong. Rescue workers later reported that conditions in the area were extremely difficult, with waves reaching several meters in height.

For someone who could barely swim, simply remaining on the surface was an enormous challenge.

Bahia nevertheless survived.

But she did not yet know that help was coming.

A Night That Would Not End

Time changes when you are in such a situation.

Minutes become long.

Hours become even longer.

And when you do not know whether anyone is searching for you, every passing moment can seem endless.

Bahia later recalled that she sometimes drifted into sleep.

It was not peaceful sleep.

She was exhausted, injured and clinging to the wreckage that was keeping her above the water.

She had suffered a fractured collarbone as well as numerous cuts and bruises.

Yet she did not let go.

Some later accounts of her story say she spent nine hours in the water, while others mention twelve or thirteen hours. The differences appear to be connected to how the time was calculated, including whether it was measured from the moment of the crash or from later rescue estimates.

What is certain is that Bahia survived for many hours in the ocean and was not found until morning.

For a twelve-year-old girl who could barely swim, it was an extraordinary feat.

But she still had no idea whether anyone would find her.

The Search Begins

Once it became clear that the aircraft had disappeared into the ocean, the search began.

But looking for survivors after a passenger plane crash at night, in rough seas and across a huge area, was extremely difficult.

Rescuers searched for wreckage.

They searched for life jackets.

They searched for bodies.

And, of course, they also searched for anyone who might have survived.

The chances of finding survivors were considered extremely small.

The weather was poor.

Wind and high waves made the work difficult for ships and smaller boats.

And then something happened that later seemed almost impossible.

One of the rescue crews spotted something in the water.

At first, it may not have been easy to identify.

It was not an obvious human figure.

It was wreckage.

And something was moving beside it.

“Someone Is Alive”

A commercial vessel was searching the area around the crash site.

The conditions were still difficult. The waves were high and the wind was strong.

Then the rescuers noticed a girl struggling to remain on top of the wreckage.

Bahia was exhausted.

A member of the rescue crew threw a life ring toward her, but the rough sea made it difficult for her to grab it.

Eventually, a sailor named Libouna Maturaffe Soulemane entered the water.

He had recently completed a rescue training course.

He reached the girl and managed to bring her to safety.

Only then did the full reality become clear.

Someone had survived.

Not an adult.

Not a crew member.

Not someone in a lifeboat.

A twelve-year-old girl.

Bahia Bakari.

The Only One

There had been 153 people on board the aircraft.

Bahia was the only person who survived the crash.

Her mother, Aziza, was not among the survivors.

For Bahia, the moment she was rescued also became the moment when she began to discover what had actually happened.

Until then, she knew only what she herself had experienced.

The plane had crashed.

She had ended up in the water.

She had heard voices.

Then she had heard nothing.

Someone had found her.

Only in hospital did she begin to understand the full scale of the disaster.

152 people had died.

Her mother was among them.

Bahia was the only survivor.

The Phone Call to Her Father

Bahia was taken to hospital in the Comoros.

She had suffered a fractured collarbone, cuts and bruises. Her condition was stable enough that she was later able to return to France.

Her father, Kassim, had been waiting there.

When he first heard that the aircraft had crashed, he believed that he had lost both his wife and his eldest daughter.

Then came the news that changed everything.

Bahia was alive.

When they eventually spoke, Bahia tried to explain what had happened.

Her memories were incomplete.

She remembered the water.

The darkness.

The voices.

The wreckage.

And waiting.

Her father later recalled how difficult it was to hear his daughter describe what had happened.

When they finally met at the airport in Paris, he hugged her.

Carefully.

She had an injured collarbone.

She was alive.

But her mother would never come home.

Rescue Was Not the End

Stories of miraculous survival often end when the survivor is pulled from the water or rescued from the wreckage.

But for the survivor, that is often when everything truly begins.

Bahia had to come to terms with the fact that she had survived an accident in which 152 other people had died.

And one of those people was her own mother.

After returning to France, she was hospitalized at a children's hospital in Paris.

She was discharged on July 23, 2009, almost a month after the crash.

Meanwhile, her survival had become international news.

Newspapers began calling her the “miracle girl.”

To the media, Bahia became a symbol of extraordinary luck.

For Bahia herself, however, the reality must have been far more complicated.

She had survived.

But she had lost her mother.

What Actually Saved Her?

There were many circumstances that contributed to Bahia's survival, and it is impossible to know exactly which one mattered most.

During the crash, she was somehow thrown clear of the main wreckage and ended up in the water.

She managed to remain on the surface.

She found a piece of wreckage to hold on to.

She survived the night.

Rescuers eventually spotted her.

And one sailor managed to reach her through the rough water.

Any one of those circumstances could have turned out differently.

Perhaps nobody would have found her.

Perhaps she would not have been able to hold on.

Perhaps the waves would have carried her away from the wreckage.

Perhaps the rescue crew would have passed by without seeing her.

That is what makes her survival so extraordinary.

It was not one single heroic act.

It was a chain of circumstances that somehow all went right.

The World Wanted to Hear Her Story

Bahia was very young and had never expected her face to appear in newspapers and television reports around the world.

Shortly after her rescue, she gave several interviews.

She described seeing the aircraft shake before the crash and later recalled the smell of fuel in the water.

Eventually, she decided to tell her story in greater detail.

In 2010, her book Moi Bahia, la miraculée was published in France. She wrote it together with Omar Gendouz.

The book became her personal account of the disaster and her survival.

It was also published in other languages, allowing people around the world to learn about the twelve-year-old girl who had survived one of the most extraordinary aviation disasters of her generation.

Her story was not simply something journalists had reconstructed.

It was also the testimony of the survivor herself.

A Twelve-Year-Old Girl Against the Ocean

If we strip away all the later headlines about miracles, one simple image remains.

A twelve-year-old girl sits on a plane at night.

Her mother is beside her.

The aircraft is approaching an island.

Something goes wrong.

And seconds later, she is no longer inside the plane.

She is in the ocean.

She does not know what happened.

She cannot see anyone.

Her mother is gone.

Wreckage surrounds her.

She hears people calling out, but gradually their voices disappear.

And she holds on.

One hour.

Another hour.

And another.

When morning begins to arrive, she is still alive.

And somewhere above the ocean, there is finally a chance that someone might see her.

A Ship on the Horizon

In later accounts, Bahia recalled seeing a ship on the horizon while she was waiting for rescue.

But it was too far away.

She could not swim to it.

She could not signal it.

There was almost nothing she could do.

A person can see rescue and still be completely unable to reach it.

Bahia had only the wreckage beneath her and her own strength.

Yet she held on until the rescuers finally came close enough to reach her.

The Strongest Moment Came Afterwards

If Bahia had died, she would have been one of the victims of the disaster.

Because she survived, her life changed.

Suddenly newspapers, television stations and people around the world wanted to know who she was.

To the public, she was “the girl who survived a plane crash.”

To her father, however, she was simply his daughter.

The child he had believed was dead.

And then, suddenly, he saw her walking off an aircraft at the airport.

Injured.

Exhausted.

But alive.

At that moment, two realities existed side by side.

The joy of knowing Bahia had survived.

And the unbearable knowledge that her mother would never return.

That mixture of happiness and grief followed her home.

Life After the Crash

Bahia gradually returned to a more ordinary life.

She continued her education in France, while her survival became an important part of her public story.

The disaster, however, naturally remained with her.

In 2022, she again spoke in detail about the crash during legal proceedings connected to the disaster.

She described the moments before the crash and the hours she spent in the ocean.

She remembered the turbulence, the impact and the feeling of finding herself in a dark, seemingly endless world of water.

More than a decade had passed since the accident.

Yet some moments are probably impossible to leave completely behind.

One Out of 153

On June 30, 2009, an Airbus A310 crashed into the Indian Ocean near the Comoros Islands.

There were 153 people on board.

152 died.

One survived.

She was twelve-year-old Bahia Bakari.

She had no life jacket.

She could barely swim.

She was injured.

She was alone.

She spent many hours in the ocean, clinging to a piece of wreckage and waiting in the darkness.

Then someone finally saw her.

People often describe stories like this as miracles.

Perhaps they are.

But the word “miracle” can sometimes hide the most important part of the story.

Bahia had to endure all those hours.

Nobody could hold the wreckage for her.

Nobody could keep her above the water for her.

Nobody could make the decision for her to keep holding on.

When the sailor finally pulled her from the ocean, it was not a victory over the disaster.

The disaster had already taken its terrible toll.

It was the victory of one twelve-year-old girl over the only thing she could still control:

the decision to hold on for one more moment.

And that is why, all these years later, people still ask the same question:

How could one little girl survive a passenger plane crashing into the ocean, spend a night alone in the sea, and live through a disaster that killed everyone else around her?

Perhaps there will never be a complete answer.

But one thing is certain.

Bahia Bakari held on to the wreckage.

And she did not let go.

foto: https://chatgpt.com/c/

AI Disclosure

AI was used to assist with the English translation and language editing of this article. The original article was written by the author in Czech. The English version was reviewed, edited and adapted by the author before publication.