An Adelaide woman has told of how close she and her partner came to disaster after twice cancelling their seats on ill-fated flight MH17 at the last moment.
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Simone La Posta, a marketing co-ordinator at ABC Radio in Adelaide, was booked to fly with her husband on the doomed flight twice but changed plans both times.
A tired Ms La Posta and husband Juan Jovel arrived at Adelaide Airport at 7am Friday morning from their honeymoon.
She told ABC Radio that she and Mr Jovel were originally to take the flight – which should have got them into Adelaide via a connecting flight on Saturday morning – but cancelled and instead chose a flight a day earlier.
“I’m pretty happy to be standing here talking to you right now. We flew into KL via Amsterdam on the MH17 flight the day before," she said. "It’s a bit surreal to think that one day later and I wouldn’t be standing here talking with you right now.
“We originally had our itinerary to be on that flight but then we changed it thinking we were going to be too jet-lagged for work on Monday," she said.
“Then there was another chance we could have been on that flight. When we got to Schiphol Airport on Wednesday to check in they’d overbooked that flight — so we were on standby and we only found out literally a minute before the boarding closed that we were actually going to be leaving that day.”
Ms La Posta, who learnt of the fate of MH17 when she landed and turned on her phone, has been flooded with messages from people checking that she was safe.
“We did the old Facebook update as we were sitting on the tarmac just to let everybody know we were OK," she said. "It’s amazing just hearing from people you never even speak to glad to know you’re OK.”
