On Saturday, March 27, 2021, a Eurocopter AS 350 helicopter crashed in Alaska near the Knik Glacier. There were six people on board at the time, including David Horváth and Petr Kellner. Horváth was the only survivor. “Just because we hit a piece of rock, everyone died there except me,” he said.
“I was wedged there, I was broken, I had an internal injury. Unfortunately, Petr still went there for a while. I saw him, I talked to him there,” Horváth recalled the tragic moments in the Czech TV program 13. Komnata. According to previously published testimony, Kellner was probably still alive two hours after the crash before he froze. “My friend was banging his ring on me from below, that he was under the helicopter,” he described the terrifying moments.
Horváth himself was wedged in the helicopter and waited for help for several hours. “I just fought. Every second I was there, I tried to do something,” Horváth confided. “At first I tried to turn around, but I couldn’t. Then I tried to pull out the hand that I had outstretched, but I couldn’t. I felt that the other hand was starting to freeze, so I kept hiding it, I kept breathing on it,” said Horváth.
He had a walkie-talkie with him, which he constantly tried to call someone: “We weren’t far away. But it didn’t work. It’s a terrible loss. Not only for me, for the family, for others… Those people were really good.”
“The worst thing was that we were there for six extra hours. For some special reasons, the organization we were with did not come for us,” Horváth recalled. When rescue arrived, he was already unconscious. But he was the only one who survived.
Paramedics took him to a hospital in Anchorage. He was hypothermic (he had a temperature of 28 degrees when he was admitted and was on the verge of death according to the doctors) and he had fourth degree frostbite on his hands. From the hospital, after the operation, he was able to call his girlfriend, who was eight months pregnant, to assure her that he was alive. He spent three weeks in bed in Anchorage, and a war veteran who served as a medical brother got him out of the worst depression.
He arrived in Bohemia with blackened fingers on his left hand, which had to be amputated. The doctors managed to save the basic joints, so that the hand at least has the ability to grasp. A year later he collapsed. It turned out that he had a five-centimeter hole in his diaphragm. But his mental state was the worst. Because of his damaged hands, he could not even touch the children.
Together with their partner, however, they were able to overcome the crisis. A year later, he proposed to his girlfriend, got married and had a third child. “The most important thing is that we always stick together,” he added at the end.
