A passenger described today how a terrific jolt and a loud bang were the only signs of a mid-air collision in which the small jet he was travelling in miraculously survived a deadly encounter with a much heavier Boeing 737.

Joe Sharkey and his six fellow passengers on an Embraer Legacy 600 corporate jet endured a harrowing 30 minutes as their pilots struggled to find a safe landing strip in the Amazon jungle. They landed safely, with no loss of life.

But all 155 people on board the 737, including four children and a baby, plunged to their deaths in Brazil's worst ever plane disaster. Since the crash on Friday afternoon, soldiers have been battling the humidity, heat and dense vegetation about 600 miles (1,000km) northwest of Brasilia to try to recover the bodies. By yesterday afternoon, only two bodies had been retrieved.

As the recovery operation continued, Mr Sharkey, a journalist for The New York Times, today wrote about it feels to live through a crash that "none of us should have survived".

Mr Sharkey, who contributes to the newspaper’s travel section, was on an assignment for Business Jet Traveler magazine. He was travelling with executives from Embraer and a charter company called ExcelAire, the new owner of the jet.

He was relaxing on a jet that was flying at 37,000 ft, with the window shade down, when: "Without warning, I felt a terrific jolt and heard a loud bang, followed by an eerie silence, save for the hum of the engines.

"And then the three words I will never forget. 'We've been hit'."

Astonishingly, he did not hear the roar of the 737, which is three times as heavy as the Embraer, and did not begin to realise the immense danger he was in until he lifted the shade to see "a jagged ridge, perhaps a foot high, where the five-foot-tall winglet was supposed to be".

His fear must have increased as the edge of the wing itself began to lose rivets but, amazingly, said Mr Sharkey, no one panicked as the minutes passed and the plane lost speed.

"I wondered how badly ditching -- an optimistic term for crashing -- was going to hurt.

"I thought of my family. There was no point reaching for my cellphone to try a call - there was no signal. And as our hopes sank with the sun, some of us jotted notes to spouses and loved ones and placed them in our wallets, hoping the notes would later be found."

Pilots Joe Lepore and Jan Paladino "were like infantrymen working together in a jam, just as they had been trained to do", he wrote.

They sent out a Mayday signal and scanned their instruments for an airport. After about 25 minutes Mr Sharkey said Mr Lepore spotted a runway through the trees, which turned out to be a military base in the jungle at Cacimbo.

"We came down hard and fast. I watched the pilots wrestle the aircraft because so many of their automatic controls were blown. The brought us to a halt with plenty of runway left. We staggered to the exit.

"’Nice flying,’ I told the pilots as I passed them. Actually, I inserted an unprintable word between ’nice’ and ’flying’."

"’Any time,’ Mr Paladino said with an anxious smile."

In the barracks Mr Sharkey and his fellow survivors joked that they were actually dead and in hell but at around 7:30pm, three and a half hours after they were hit, they heard from the commander that a plane with 149 passengers and six crew was missing at the same spot where their collision had happened.

At that moment they went from being the "Amazon Seven, living now on precious time that no longer belonged to us" and: "Instead we now bowed our heads in a long moment of silence, with the sound of muffled tears".

Mr Sharkey said the contrast between the heroic actions of the pilots that enabled them to live and the tragic loss of the passengers on the 737 would be a weight on their minds forever.

Later a Brazilian military inspector speculated that both planes were at the same altitude when the 737 made a frantic bank to avoid hitting the Embraer but clipped it twice and went spinning to the ground.

Mr Sharkey also asked an expert later why, as the passenger closest to the impact, he heard no sound. He was told that since each jet would have been travelling at around 500 miles per hour in opposite directions, he would only have been able to hear the roar of the 737 for less than a split second.

He concludes: "We thought again and again of the bodies still unclaimed in the jungle, and how their lives and ours had intersected, literally and metaphorically, for one horrible split second."

Search teams have now found the black boxes of the 737 but investigators have not yet revealed whether the flight recorders can explain why the crash happened.

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