I survived a mid-air plane collision that killed 154 people – here’s how it changed me

David Rimmer was flying over the jungle from Manaus, Brazil, on a business trip in 2006 when the private jet he was on flew into a Boeing 737 800 in a collision unlike anything seen before in aviation history.

Rimmer, 64, told DailyMail.com that his plane, with seven people on board, was flying at 37,000 feet when he heard what he described as a “very sudden jolt.”

“There was no warning,” he said. ‘We really had no idea what it was, but it was more serious than a typical bump in the clouds. But we couldn’t see anything.’

Airplanes have technology designed to warn of impending collisions, but it didn’t work that day: Rimmer and the plane’s two pilots didn’t know anything serious had happened until they saw the winglet on the tip of their aircraft was damaged.

Rimmer has been married for 34 years. He and his wife have two daughters who were 10 and 12 years old at the time of the incident.

“It was hard not to keep thinking about how bad things could end and how the blow would affect my family, but I did my best not to focus on the possibility,” he said.

“It would have made it even scarier.”

Rimmer recalled that it was “pretty quiet and reserved in the back of the cabin.

“We had no means of communicating with the ground – there were no telephones and the WiFi was not activated,” he explained.

“One of the passengers, Joe Sharkey of The New York Times, wrote a farewell note to his wife, but he didn’t tell us about it until we had landed safely.

“I wish I had the presence of mind to write to my wife and daughters, but I didn’t.”

The 80-foot Embraer Legacy 600 business jet flew from where it was manufactured to the U.S., Rimmer explained.

Rimmer said: ‘We looked at the left side of the aircraft and at the winglet, instead of this smooth piece of metal, it was this jagged edge. It was clearly broken off by something. But we really had no idea what it was.”

The closing speed (effectively the combined speeds) of the two planes was 1,000 miles per hour, Rimmer discovered after the 2006 collision, meaning there was no way they could have seen anything.

Rimmer said: ‘Our crew took control of the aircraft and it was seriously compromised.’

One of Rimmer’s colleagues looked back and saw that an ‘almost surgically’ piece of the tail had also been torn off.

He said: ‘There was nothing I could do but get on with it and keep my wits about me. It would have been very easy to descend into this overwhelming fear, but it would not have done any good.

‘It would have just made the next period that much more terrifying. It was quite solemn in the cabin.

‘It was very quiet. We just knew we were in serious trouble and hoped for the best. And about 35 minutes later we landed at this remote military base in the Amazon.”

It wasn’t until the crew was eating pizza that the only Portuguese speaker among the crew made a gruesome discovery.

Rimmer said, “He came back to our table and said, ‘Guys, I have some terrible news to share with you. A plane is missing along our flight path, and they don’t know what happened to it, but it’s too much of a coincidence.’

The crew went from feeling relief to terrible sadness, Rimmer said.

They also realized how slim their chances of surviving such a collision had been.

Rimmer said: ‘The chance of anyone surviving such an accident is minimal. I don’t think it’s ever happened before.

‘If the plane had been a few centimeters lower it would have taken off from our wing. If it had been a few inches closer to us, it would have taken off our tails, and neither would have survived. It’s just impossible to fathom how close it was.”

The collision between the Boeing and Rimmer’s jet caused the larger plane’s wing to be severed.

The Boeing 737 crashed in the jungle, killing all 154 passengers and crew.

The investigation into the crash became highly politicized in Brazil, with some blame being placed on the pilots of the smaller planes.

But Rimmer said that despite the differing conclusions from the Brazilian investigation and the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), he believes the fault lies “fundamentally” in air traffic control’s inability to tell the two planes apart.

He said: ‘Our pilots have no view of the sky. Only air traffic controllers do that.’

Rimmer has since campaigned for improved aviation safety and continues to work in aviation as CEO of AB Aviation.

He said the accident fundamentally changed his outlook on life.

He said: ‘The first challenge was to find out why us? Why were we spared? 154 people don’t. There is no answer to that question.’

‘The next question is: what should I do with this gift? It’s not a total celebration, because our survival was tied to this tragedy. There is gratitude, but you never want to lose sight of the loss.”

Rimmer said he still thinks about the accident every day, and that every day now feels like a “gift.” He says he now tries to be more charitable, give more, and focus on his family and being a better father.

He gives to charities outside aviation and also campaigns for improved safety.

He says I feel it is my duty to try to raise awareness of safety issues in the aviation community. I use the lessons I learned from being part of such a major accident in the hope that it will help save other lives.

He says, “We on the plane are all celebrating two birthdays. One is our chronological anniversary, and the other is the day we were spared.”