I'm a Celebrity star was supposed to be on doomed plane which crashed
Scarlette Douglas, who was on I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! in 2022 and presented A Place in the Sun for seven years, spoke in the wake of the Air India plane crash
Popular TV presenter Scarlette Douglas"hates flying" - because she was supposed to be on a doomed plane which crashed and killed more than 200 people.
Although she hosted Channel 4 show A Place in the Sun for seven years, Scarlette dislikes air travel after her friend died when Air France Flight 447 crashed into the mid-Atlantic Ocean. All 228 people onboard, including Scarlette's mate, lost their lives in the global tragedy in June 2009.
And Scarlette, who was on I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! in 2022, was meant to be on the Airbus A330. Her friend booked both their spaces but Scarlette had a job in Hollywood so didn't travel in the end.
The 38-year-old presenter, from Enfield, north London, made the heartbreaking remark at the Taste of London Food Festival opening party in Regent's Park this week. Speaking to a Daily Mail reporter, she said: "I lost a really good friend of mine in the Air France crash from Brazil to France. The scary thing was I was supposed to be on that flight. She had booked it."
Scarlette says she "hates flying" as a result, a challenge during her role on A Place in the Sun. She hosted the programme and its various spin-offs between 2015 and 2022, before her I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! stint.
The star was asked about flying in the wake of the Air India plane crash, which saw all but one of those onboard the Boeing die in a horror crash. Some 53 Brits were killed after the plane, destined for Gatwick Airport, collided into a medical college in Ahmedabad, western India.
Although the investigation into the crash continues, an aviation expert has claimed the co-pilot pulled the plane's wing flaps instead of retracting the landing gear moments after take-off.
But inconsistent airspeed indications and miscommunication led to the pilots inadvertently stalling the doomed Air France plane, on which Scarlette's friend travelled in 2009. They failed to recover the plane from the stall, and the plane crashed into the mid-Atlantic Ocean.
The investigation was hampered because the aircraft's flight recorders were not recovered from the ocean floor until May 2011, nearly two years after the accident. Eventually, the final - and conclusive - report by France's Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA) was published on July 2012.
The majority of those onboard the four-year-old Airbus were Brazilians and French citizens. However, five tragic Brits died in the atrocity, including 11-year-old boy Alexander Bjoroy, oil worker Graham Gardner and PR executive Neil Warrior.
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