THE rescue of a North-East teenager airlifted to hospital after suffering multiple injuries in a car smash will feature on BBC TV on Tuesday.

Elly Latif was in a wheelchair for four months after she suffered a broken femur, shattered and dislocated elbow, broken ribs and facial injuries when her car skidded into the path of a lorry on the way home from a visit to Flamingoland.

The student's dramatic rescue by the Yorkshire Air Ambulance will air in the February 17 episode of Countryside 999 on BBC 1 at 11am.

Elly, now 20, had spent a day at the North Yorkshire theme park with her best friend and boyfriend, and was driving back to her Stockton home in driving rain when the accident happened.

"It was pouring with rain and although I was not driving very fast I must have taken this bend too quickly," she said.

"When I braked the wheels just locked and we slid across the road straight into the path of a lorry."

Countryside 999 follows the long rescue operation to get badly-injured Ms Latif out of the car.

Boyfriend, Daniel Thomas, broke a toe and her friend Billie Taylor cracked a vertebrae and both were taken to hospital by road ambulance.

Ms Latif, who is studying biomedical science at the University of Lancaster, was taken by the Yorkshire Air Ambulance to York District Hospital.

"I thought the air ambulance was just used to rescue people in remote areas or from mountains.

"If I had had to go by road it would have been much longer. Also with the amount of pain I was in the bumpy roads would have been just awful."

She missed a whole term of her first year at university and has faced a long recovery, but feels very lucky.

"It's been hard," she said. "I had to do a lot of work from home and took my end of year exams in August.

"But it could have been a lot worse and I'm really grateful to all the emergency services for everything they did for me."

Yorkshire Air Ambulance is an independent charity providing a rapid response emergency service to five million people across Yorkshire. It needs to raise £9,990 each day to keep its two helicopters flying.

Without any direct Government funding the only help the charity receives is the secondment of its paramedics from the Yorkshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust.

The rapid response emergency charity had the busiest weekend in its 14-year history when the Tour de France passed through Yorkshire last year attending 31 incidents between Friday, July 4 and Sunday, July 6.