A British student who jumped from a window of the hotel complex in Gonesse which was demolished in the Concorde air disaster spoke yesterday of her relief that she escaped with only minor injuries. Ms Alice Brooking (21), a modern languages student at Cambridge University, was speaking on the telephone to her sister, Nathalie (24) in London when the Air France Concorde crashed into the Hotel Issimo, killing 109 passengers and crew and four people on the ground.
She said she heard a loud noise "like an earthquake" as the aircraft dropped onto the hotel complex and immediately flames consumed the hotel. "My room shook violently. I dropped the phone and ran to the door but the landing was covered in flames, so I just rushed to the window," she told BBC R1. "I looked out of the window and saw the receptionist down beneath me in the carpark, so I said to him `what should I do?' He said `you have to jump', so I jumped."
The student from Tonbridge, Kent, was working in France as a tour manager for the tour company, Club Europe, as part of a compulsory section of her degree course. She had arrived in the hotel 30 minutes earlier to await the arrival of members of the Suffolk Youth Wind Band, who were due to perform in France. Ms Brooking said that after jumping from her first floor bedroom window she ran across a field in her bare feet: "There was a big, big field in the middle of nowhere, so I ran, barefoot across the fields, as I'd left my shoes in my room. I didn't have time to think about anything, then tried calling the attention of the car drivers and then basically got myself away.
"I just keep saying to myself over and over again, `I'm alive, I'm alive, I'm alive'."
Ms Brooking, who suffered burns to her arms and hands, said the heat from the fire in the hotel and the aircraft was "searing" and when she saw television pictures of the scene later could not believe she had escaped alive.