Pindah Pesawat, Pesepakbola Swedia Dalkurd FF Lolos dari Kecelakaan Germanwings
Players from Swedish Club Dalkurd FF Escaped Death of Doomed Germanwings
Editor : Ismail Gani
Translator : Novita Cahyadi
A SWEDISH FOOTBALL team has told of how they narrowly escaped death after a last-minute decision against booking their players on Germanwings Flight 4U9525.
Four Lufthansa subsidiary flights left Barcelona around the same time on Tuesday morning and Division 1 team Dalkurd FF, from Borlange, central Sweden, had players on three of them.
The team had initially planned to travel on Flight 4U9525 to Düsseldorf, but instead split the team over the three remaining flights from Barcelona, via Germany.
When the Dalkurd FF delegation of 29 players and staff landed, they found out that the fourth flight had crashed, and the passengers next to them at check in a few hours earlier had died.
All 144 passengers, including two babies and 16 teenagers from a German high school, and six crew members lost their lives.
The Airbus A320 ploughed into the mountainside in a remote region of the French Alps en route from Spain to Germany at more than 400mph.
'We were supposed to have been on that flight. We checked in with all of the passengers. It's surreal,' Dalkurd FF's sports chief Adil Kizil told Aftonbladet.
'When we got to the airport in Barcelona there were four flights leaving that time, flying north over the Alps.
'Four flights and we had players on three of them. Let's just say we were very lucky.'
Dalkurd FF, formed in 2004 by Kurdish immigrants, play in Sweden's Division 1, the third level of Swedish football.
The team had been on a week-long training camp in Barcelona and were flying home.
Mr Kizil told the newspaper how they had tried to fit the entire team on the Germanwings flight, but that the connection time in Düsseldorf to continue their journey home to Sweden was too long.
Instead they split the team onto the three other flights, with one group flying via München and two others via Zürich.
Mr Kizil said the players are still shocked, and that their thoughts are with the families of the victims.
'All the people on that plane were at the same check-in as us. We also flew with a subsidiary to Lufthansa, so everyone went to the same gates.'