A TEENAGER who received a donor liver rescued from a plane crash has come face to face with the hero firefighter who ran into the burning jet to retrieve it.

Kate Trevener, from Shard End, was hours from death when a private Cessna carrying the organ from Belfast crashed at Birmingham Airport in thick fog.

But firefighter Nick Jordan came to the rescue, freeing the pilot from the burning cockpit before returning to retrieve the donor organ.

Fashion student Kate was given a chance to live when she had the life-saving operation at Queen Elizabeth Hospital two days before her 18th birthday.

And despite her body later rejecting the organ, she remains determined to keep fighting her rare condition of acute liver failure – and is now facing her THIRD transplant.

Now more than a year after the runway crash, Kate and her family met Nick and the fire-fighting team at Birmingham Airport.

Kate, now aged 19, told the Birmingham Mail: “I’d been in contact with Nick on email but this was the first time I got to meet him in person which was great. It was really weird to go the airport, be shown round and be told what happened that day.

‘‘I was desperately waiting for the transplant and my family had been told to say goodbye. It was quite overwhelming and emotional.

“But it was great to finally meet Nick and say thank you in person for what he did. He is a hero – without that liver I wouldn’t have had a chance to live.”

Nick described the ‘‘surreal’’ moment he plucked the liver from the wreckage of the plane in November 2010.

He said: “Once everyone was out of the plane it was a case of get in there and have a look around.