He took off less than a minute before disaster struck
In 2018 when an earthquake and tsunami struck Indonesia the Mutiara Sis Al Jufri Airport in Palu was in the path of destruction.
On 28 September just moments before the airport was struck by a 7.5 magnitude earthquake a plane with 148 people on board was still a few minutes away from take-off.
The pilot, Ricosetta Mafella, couldn’t see what was happening as he was sitting in the cockpit of the grounded plane but he decided to take off earlier than scheduled, which saved his life and the lives of the other 147 people on board the plane.
Speaking to the BBC in the aftermath of the natural disaster, he said: “I was rushing to leave. There was a voice in my head that told me, just get out of here immediately.
“I told my crew and the ground crew to speed up.”
Beyond the voice in his head, there was also the voice of someone the pilot described as his ‘guardian angel’, 21-year-old Anthonius Gunawan Agung who was in the airport’s control tower and stayed there to make sure the plane took off before the earthquake hit.
Tragically, the earthquake which struck the airport less than a minute after the plane took off blocked Agung’s attempts to get to safety himself.
The heroic 21-year-old was forced to jump from the crumbling tower and suffered a broken leg along with internal injuries from the four-storey drop.
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His colleagues rushed him to hospital before it was decided that he would need to be transferred by helicopter, but he died of his injuries.
Agung’s last recorded words were his final instruction to the pilot to take off and escape the oncoming destruction, saying: “Batik 6321 clear for take off.”
Mafella said that the 21-year-old was a ‘national hero’ and once he’d got the plane in the air he could see huge waves from the incoming tsunami.
The pilot tried calling the air traffic controller, who had remained at his post even as his tower had started swaying and cracking, but now received no response.
He was later told that Agung had been urged to leave the tower by his colleagues but told them ‘wait, wait, Batik is still here’ and he would be staying until the plane took off, with the pilot saying he was left ‘speechless’ when he learned exactly what had happened.
The earthquake caused significant damage to the tower and cracked the runway at the airport.
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