'It was on fire and glowing orange. I thought it was going to hit us'

At the pine table in the kitchen of her small cottage, Amanda Spruce was chatting over coffee with a friend, Dawn Waggot, before getting ready to go out for the evening.

At the pine table in the kitchen of her small cottage, Amanda Spruce was chatting over coffee with a friend, Dawn Waggot, before getting ready to go out for the evening.

Her two young dogs were making a boisterous nuisance of themselves while Remy, her eight-year-old daughter, was settling down for a night in front of the television with young babysitters who work at the local stables. Then they heard it - a screaming noise like a spiralling aircraft from a Second World War film.

"You could hear the plane diving and you could hear the thrust of the engine trying to do something. You could feel the vibrations of everything and you could see it through the window coming straight at us, glowing orange and on fire," Ms Waggot said yesterday.

"I just kept thinking, 'It's going to hit us. It's going to hit us'. I looked at Amanda's face, and I was just frozen."

As Remy dived under the table for cover and all the lights went off as the stricken aircraft scythed through power cables, Ms Spruce also found herself becoming numb.

"It was like there was nothing you can do. It was as if someone told you that the nuclear bomb was about to go off - there is just nothing you can do," she said.

But as the flaming vision went past the kitchen window she found herself rushing outside. "The adrenalin just kicks in and somehow you move. I was outside before it hit the ground," Ms Spruce said. "The flames just leapt up; it was horrific. It was brighter than daylight. It was like someone was shining red spotlights on everything. The ground shook and it lifted you off your feet."

Later she found that everything in her younger daughter's bedroom had fallen off the walls, and the three-year-old's cot had been bounced across the floor. Fortunately the child was out of the house with her father at the time, but Remy became hysterical.

For Ms Waggot, the image of the crash was even more stark: "If somebody said Armageddon, they wouldn't be far wrong," she said.

Yesterday morning the villagers of Great Hallingbury awoke to discover the full extent of Wednesday night's horror and of their most lucky of escapes. Across several hundred yards of Essex farmland lay the debris of the Korean Air Boeing 747 cargo flight, flung in every direction. Some of it was still smouldering.

In a field no more than 50 yards from Martin Mugele's farmyard, in a crater 30 feet deep, was what was left of the aircraft's fuselage.

Specialist police search teams and officials from the air accident investigation branch of the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, who scoured the site yesterday, said there was little left to see - certainly very little resembling the main body of an aircraft.

All around the crater lay other debris. At the point where the plane must have hit the ground lay one of its huge jet engines, twisted and useless.

On the other side of the crater, perhaps 200 yards from the site of the impact, one of the plane's wheels was lying on its rim, close to piles of torn and bent aluminium.

Somewhere near here investigators found the "black box" flight recorder, which should give evidence on the cause of the crash. Here too, they found the body of one of the four crew members.

Wreckage was scattered over a huge area. At a communications centre set up by the police, images taken from a helicopter and relayed on closed-circuit television focused on odd pieces of metal lodged in ditches or hidden from searchers by young conifers.

Meanwhile, on the far side of the crash site, there was more debris - pieces of metal and strips of torn cloth - hanging from the branches of trees blackened by the explosion. It looked as though there had been a vast flood and now the waters had resided.

"God knows what it would have been like if that had been a passenger plane," one police officer said.

The villagers had been fearing a scene of such devastation for 30 years, with the expansion of Stansted airport into Britain's third-biggest international freight terminal. All morning, as police and investigators continued their searches, the skies roared with the sound of huge planes climbing into the skies after take-off.

Norman Mead, the chairman of the Great Hallingbury parish council and a staunch campaigner against Stansted airport expansion, said: "It has always been a lurking fear that something nasty might happen. Last night our fears were indeed realised.

"It has dawned on many people the risk we run [by living] here.

"We are all used to aircraft flying low overhead but 400 tons of aircraft out of control is quite something else," he said.

"If it had been flying over Bishop's Stortford [the nearest sizeable town] we would have had another Lockerbie."

While the plane missed Bishop's Stortford by at least a mile, many homes lie just yards from where the Boeing came down. The dubious honour of having had the nearest miss must go to Brian McLellan, 64, whose bungalow is less than 100 yards from the point of impact.

One investigator estimated that the Boeing's wing had passed just two feet above his chimney pots.

"I was sitting in the kitchen when there was this noise," Mr McLellan said. "It was like a wartime plane coming down - it was at full throttle. I looked out and there were flames everywhere."

Mr McLellan and a friend, Paul Ellis, ran to the scene. "There was nothing we could do," Mr McLellan said. "There was just a large wall of flames."

Mr Ellis added: "It was just flames and debris everywhere. A flock of pigeons took off from the trees - as they flew over the flames several just dropped down and disintegrated."

On the other side of the farmland, known as Bedlar's Green, where the plane came down, another villager, Richard Smith, rushed out with towels. "I only had a torch. I was scanning the ground looking for evidence of people. I did not want to look - I was a bit afraid - but I felt I had to."

Residents of Great Hallingbury have been stunned by the accident - and by their close escape. "This morning I was still shaking," said Mr McLellan, a farrier for the local community. "I reckon it's all the horseshoes lying around here that made it miss. It's all that good luck."