PETALING JAYA: Maria Jean Burkhart was just three years old when a part-time reporter covering a plane crash near Subang airport in 1977 plucked her to safety.
Forty six years later, the youngest survivor of the Japan Airlines (JAL) tragedy and her accidental rescuer, R Nadeswaran, have reunited amid extreme emotions.
Maria said meeting Nadeswaran, also known as Nades, has been a reminder of “how precious life is and how grateful I am to him”.
“God had a hand in saving me and in making sure Nades was in the right place at the right time. I am amazed that I lived through the crash.
“I could have just disappeared, but I was lucky to have been saved by a good and upstanding man,” she said.
Maria said meeting Nadeswaran was like meeting a father because she grew up without one, and he replied: “She’s like my newfound daughter.”
She said she made the trip from Portland, Oregon in the US, where she works as a nurse, to Kuala Lumpur “to thank my hero in person”.
Nadeswaran, now a 72-year-old columnist, said: “This was a blast from the past, coming into contact with someone I had met as a little girl, and exchanged only a few words with.”
The reunion retold their part in the crash on September 27,1977: a toddler’s loss of her father, not knowing her mother was fighting for her life, and a life-changing episode for her guardian angel.
The family from Seremban was returning home from California on a flight from Tokyo when the aircraft slammed into a hill at Elmina Estate, Sungai Buloh.
Maria’s American father, Robert Nelson, then a 51-year-old manager of an electronics components factory in Seremban, was one of the 49 fatalities.
She and her mother, Salimah Nordin, then 29, were among the 45 survivors. They were flung in different directions, with Maria believed to have landed on a thick pile of rubber leaves.
The aircraft had descended below the minimum descent altitude of 750ft, then at 300 ft, before crashing into the side of the hill, four miles from the Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport.
An arresting image of a bare-chested Nadeswaran carrying an almost bare-bodied baby Maria from near the wreckage to the University Hospital in Petaling Jaya captured a dramatic moment of the calamity.
The iconic photo was front-paged in The New Straits Times (NST) and The Malay Mail, touching the hearts of many, and setting the tone for Nadeswaran’s heroic feats as a reporter later.
Maria said the Malay Mail news clipping had been in her possession all these years, and it was what made her trace Nadeswaran.
She did that from the US where she had moved to with her mother about a year after the crash. She was only told about her father’s demise when she was about six years old.
Nadeswaran had over the years tried in vain to contact Maria through the US Embassy in Kuala Lumpur and Japan Airlines, during a visit to America, and he even searched genealogy websites.
He said just before the Movement Control Order was imposed on March 18 in 2020, Kini Academy, where he taught journalism, forwarded him a one-paragraph email from Maria.
She wrote that she was keen to speak with Nadeswaran, and attached a photo of his article. They soon developed a close friendship.
Coming to Malaysia
Maria has never returned to Malaysia since 1977, and this trip was to meet Nadeswaran, to know the country, and to take a “long shot” in tracing her relatives in Seremban.
She requested help from the public to locate her aunt Zaleha and cousin Haliza, both of whom she only remembers by their first name. They had lived in Seremban with her grandfather Nordin Hassan and his wife Haloya.
Maria said she has forged a “father and daughter” relationship with Nadeswaran, leaning on him as she got a first-hand account of the worst day in her life.
“That made the trip to Malaysia worthwhile,” said Maria who has a son Jonah, 21.
On Friday, by coincidence, Maria met Dr Sylain Das, who was in the medical team as an anaesthetist during rescue efforts in the jungles at Elmina Estate.
It was another poignant moment for both of them at the Royal Selangor Club, Bukit Kiara, as the doctor spoke of the horrors he had encountered.
On Friday, Maria, her fiancé Tony Hazlewood, Nadeswaran and his friend Raymond Hon visited the crash site, together with some officers of Sime Darby Properties, that is developing the area.
They observed a minute of silence to remember those who had died in the tragic event, after which Maria said a few words in honour of them.
JAL had after the crash made arrangements for Maria’s father to be buried at veterans’ memorial in Half Moon Bay, California.
Nadeswaran said Sime Darby had preserved a few pieces of the remains of the plane when the area was cleared, and hoped a cenotaph would be erected at the site to complement the memorial built in the Japanese cemetery in Kuala Lumpur.
46 years ago…
Nadeswaran was banging away a story on the typewriter as a sports stringer when Malay Mail chief reporter MA Razman’s shout thundered across the editorial floor.
Razman wanted volunteers to rush to the scene of the plane crash and since the news reporters were not back from their assignments, Nadeswaran stepped forward.
While waiting for a ride from cameraman Soong Hon Sin, news filtered in that a Douglas DC-8 airliner, Japan Airlines Flight 715, had crashed in Elmina Estate.
At the scene, then Selangor deputy police chief, the late Kassim Ali, beckoned Nadeswaran to follow him on the trek up the hill, and he found Maria.
Kassim asked him to take the baby to the hospital. “She was almost bare-bodied. I took off my shirt, wrapped her up, and carried her in my arms to the car,” said Nadeswaran.
Nadeswaran handed over the little girl to the emergency department and returned to Balai Berita to file his story.
NST executive editor, the late David Tambyah, asked him to write a 10-paragraph story to accompany a grainy black and white photograph of him carrying the toddler.
It made the cover of the then broadsheet newspaper, and two days later, his story about giving Maria a teddy bear and receiving a “thank you, uncle” from her at the children’s ward, made the front page again.
Later that day, he received a congratulatory letter and a RM100 voucher for his efforts from the late Noordin Sopiee, who was then NST group editor.
Nadeswaran said Noordin interviewed him shortly after that and offered him a job at The Malay Mail news desk, remarking, “You will be more useful there.”
Less than four months later, Nadeswaran covered the crash of a Malaysia Airlines domestic flight from Penang to Kuala Lumpur that plunged into a swamp at Tanjung Kupang, Johor, after it was hijacked by unidentified individuals.
“The last few days brought back memories from the days when I was a stringer (part-time reporter), living from hand to mouth and the crash changed the course of my life and career,” he said. - FMT
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