Image copyright EPA Image caption "A hair's breadth from catastrophe", local police say
A quick-thinking French tourist has been praised for preventing a bus from plunging over a cliff in the Austrian Alps after the driver passed out.
The vehicle was travelling through the mountains in the Tyrolean Alps with 21 passengers on board when the driver, 76, collapsed, police say.
As the bus continued towards a steep cliff, the Frenchman was able to brake.
The bus crashed into a barrier at the side of the road and came to a stop. Four people were taken to hospital.
The passenger, a 65-year-old Frenchman, was sitting close to the driver when he became ill near the city of Schwaz in western Austria on Saturday, local media report.
He then leapt from his seat as the vehicle crashed through the wooden roadside guardrail and applied the brake, leaving the bus full of passengers hanging over the cliff edge a short distance from a 100m (328ft) drop.
"We were a hair's breadth from catastrophe," a local police spokesman said, adding it was "incredible luck" that the passenger's reflexes had managed to stop the bus, AFP news agency reports.
In 2004, five tourists were killed when a coach left the road and tumbled down a 30m embankment near the village of Bad Dürrnberg, south of Salzburg, in Austria.
tekdemon on September 25th, 2017 at 13:32 UTC »
Props to the 65 year old French tourist for having fast enough reflexes to actually run over to the bus driver seat and brake in time. Probably not that easy to actually get your leg in there on the brake either with someone on the seat already so the fact that he managed to brake it in time is crazy.
ThatLinguaGirl on September 25th, 2017 at 13:04 UTC »
"Applied the brake" sounds so polite and technical. I imagine it was more like he f-ing stomped on that brake.
i_like_polls on September 25th, 2017 at 12:21 UTC »
Holy shit, that had to be intense. If you look at the position of the bus too, it really seems like it was indeed in the nick of time.