Su último vuelo

Her Last Flight is based on a real story that occurred in Spain toward the end of the fifties. On the 4th of December of 1958, an Aviaco flight crashes into a mountain by the name of The Knee of the Dead Woman. The plane cannot be located for several days, till a young local shepherd finds it at an altitude of 6500 feet. The twenty one people on board this flight from Vigo to Madrid are all dead, although Luciano Otero, the shepherd, finds the flight’s only stewardess, Maribel Sastre, seated on a rock, as if she hadn’t died in the accident but rather by the cold of the two days out in the open air.

The author has reconstructed and fictionalized the story thanks to documents and numerous interviews with the surviving families and other people implicated in the tragedy. This is a novel in the borderline between fiction and non-fiction, the “New New Journalism” type of story.

The novel revolves around three stories, retold in three main accounts.

The first, in the first person, that of the stewardess Maribel, who is only eighteen, her yearning to become a stewardess, to escape a grey country where women hardly have an opportunity. She, in the first person, retells this last trip: her memories, thoughts, the world of the first stewardesses, of the pilots who came from the Franco ranks, of the Spain of 1958…

The second story is that of her mother, Anita, told forty-five years later, in 2003. Mrs. Ana, in her nineties and who does not have much longer to live, is, nonetheless, strong both physically and anemically, and remembers everything that happened to her, to her husband and daughter.

The third story is that of the sisters Josefa and Ester, ten and nine respectively, that after five years are going to be reunited with their parents. It is a story of emigration, of Galician parents who had to go to Madrid seeking employment, leaving two of their daughters behind with the grandparents till they’d made sufficient money to have an apartment and space for all of the daughters.

Her Last Flight also narrates the tense wait for news and the search for the plane, but it is mainly the story of five women touched by a tragedy, but with immense strength and cheerfulness.