Eyewitness: 'Lucky to be alive'

Alessandro Bertellotti is one of the 118 survivors

Journalist Alessandro Bertellotti of Italian public broadcaster Rai was on board the Indonesian passenger plane, which crashed on landing in Yogyakarta, killing 22 people. Here he describes what happened.

I am one of the lucky ones to be alive. I got away with a little bit of blood on my face.

I was sitting in the end of the plane, on the left hand side. The journey went well, until the moment of landing.

We realised that something was wrong when the plane started approaching the runway without slowing down.

Once we touched down it jumped a bit and still didn't slow down. At that point everyone knew that there was something wrong.

The plane kept rolling even after we reached the end of the runway. It got dark, objects started flying around, people started screaming.

I remember that I kept cool, thinking only about escaping, nothing else.

A fire started three or four seats in front of me, on the right hand side of the plane. Everyone started screaming. A woman behind me kept pushing me and saying 'go go go'.

Luckily I was close to the emergency exit and I jumped out, together with many other people. We landed on mud and grass.

The police and ambulances arrived within minutes and started looking after the injured. Those of us who were fine were escorted away from the scene.

I was travelling to Indonesia for a Unesco conference about restoration of the area damaged by last year's earthquake in Java.

I didn't take my camera, or any of my belongings, I didn't think about anything else but getting out of there. All I can say and think of now is how desperately lucky I am.