Statistically, traveling by air is safer than any other form of transportation - even driving in a car.

Unfortunately, a Yemenia Airlines flight defied the statistics this week.

It crashed into the Indian Ocean early Tuesday near the Comoros Islands, a couple hundred miles off the east coast of Africa.

But a 13-year-old passenger on that flight also defied the statistics.

She survived.

And on Thursday, Bahia Bakari was flown home from to Paris, where she'll continue her recovery.

According to the Associated Press, Bahia and her mother were on their way to the Comoros Islands to spend the summer there with relatives.

Unfortunately, her mother and the 151 other people who were on the plane are now presumed to be dead.

But Bahia's father, Kassim Bakari, was waiting for her Thursday morning when her special flight home arrived in France.

"I would never have thought she would have survived like this," he told CNN. "It is God's will."

After the joyful reunion, Bahia was rushed to a Paris hospital.

She's recovering from a broken collarbone, hypothermia (she got cold while floating in the ocean for hours), cuts, bruises and shock, according to media reports.

But none of her injuries is said to be life-threatening.

According to various accounts, Bahia doesn't remember much about the plane crash.

"She said, 'Daddy, I don't know what happened but the plane fell into the water and I found myself in the water ... surrounded by darkness," her father told CNN.

"I could not see anyone," he says she added.

Bahia apparently was ejected from the plane when it crashed.

That may have saved her life.

Investigators fear the bodies of almost all of the crash victims are trapped in the plane's wreckage, hundreds of feet below the ocean's surface.

Another factor that may have saved Bahia life - the pilots might have been preparing to land the plane when it crashed.

So it probably wasn't flying very high in the sky, and Bahia didn't have as far to fall.

Bahia says she clung to a piece of debris for at least 12 hours, possibly longer, before she was rescued.

According to one report, she even fell asleep at one point.

Her father says she can barely swim.

But somehow, she did what it took to survive.

"It is truly, truly miraculous," said the head of the rescue team that found her.

"It is an enormous message that she sends to the world," said French cooperation minister Alain Joyandet, in an interview with the Associated Press. "Almost nothing is impossible."