A 23-year-old B.C. woman said she escaped through a window as smoke and flames filled an airplane that crashed in southern Thailand on Sunday, killing most aboard.

The plane crashed upon landing in heavy rain on the Thai resort island of Phuket, killing 87 people.
(Daily News/Associated Press)

"The guys behind me kicked in their window," Mildred Anne Furlong of Prince George, one of about 39 survivors, told CBC Newsworld from the Bangkok Phuket Hospital.

"Smoke was coming in and you thought you were going to pass out. Flames were spreading."

Officials said 91 people died after the aircraft, operated by the low-cost One-Two-Go airline, crashed while attempting to land in stormy weather at the resort city of Phuket. The McDonnell Douglas MD-82 plane, owned by Orient-Thai Airlines, split into two parts and burst into flames.

It was carrying 130 passengers, many of them foreign tourists. Furlong said she believes she may have been the only Canadian on board and was definitely one of few lucky ones — among perhaps a half-dozen people who escaped with only minor injuries.

Mildred Furlong is shown in an undated family photo.
(CBC)

Furlong said the one-hour flight from Bangkok was uneventful, aside from rain and some turbulence, but passengers noticed the pilot was having trouble on the descent.

"We broke through the clouds and it was quite dark. There was a lot of rain. We were all looking out the windows and the trees were blowing really hard," Furlong said.

"We started to go for the landing and he just about hit the runway, but couldn't make it, so he lifted back up. We started to circle. I thought he was going to circle back around and try again, and then we took a sharp right and we started going for the ground."

At this point, Furlong said she tucked her head between her knees.

"We bounced once and then went straight into an embankment with trees and bushes," she told Newsworld.

"It was raining really hard. We saw a couple of people who were on fire. Just a handful of us made it out. I counted 17 or 20 who had made it out on their own."

Furlong and other passengers who bailed out landed on the wing and were soon transported to hospital in a minivan. She suffered whiplash and cuts. A hospital official said she could be released from hospital as early as Monday.

Officials said on Sunday it was too early to establish the cause of the crash but added the weather was likely a factor. They said the flight's two data recorders or "black boxes" have been recovered from the charred and twisted wreckage and will be sent to the United States for analysis.