Man tells how he survived Cork plane crash horror

Speaking from his hospital bed, father-of-three Mark Dickens said he felt the aircraft was too close to the ground when it came in to land and that a wing clipped the Tarmac, flipping the aircraft.

Despite the screams of passengers, the stench of smoke and fuel and the 40-year-old from Kent being half paralysed at the time, he said he felt quite calm.

"As we came through the fog, or the cloud as I thought it was, I saw the runway. We were quite close to the runway - too close, I thought," he said.

"The next thing I recall we banked and the wing hit the runway and we flipped over.

"There was obviously lots of screaming and shouting and then the next thing I remember the plane was at a rest, I was upside down, trapped under seats and people, wedged in.

"I just focused on my children and seeing them again."

Mr Dickens has retained London-based specialist aviation law firm Stewarts Law to seek compensation over last Friday's crash which claimed six lives.

The plane came down in dense fog and crashed on landing, killing six people while six others survived.

Ireland's Air Accident Investigations Unit is expected to publish a preliminary report within three weeks.

Mr Dickens praised the medical teams at Cork University Hospital, where he has been treated for the past week, including a nurse who took his wife shopping. "That's the kind of level of care that I've had," he said.

Mr Dickens, who was badly injured along the right side of his body, said he remembered smelling smoke and fuel when the plane came to a halt on grass beside the runway.

"I was fairly calm actually, if I'm honest," he said. "I was thinking I was alive, I was lucky to be alive."