A miracle in seat 11A: How Viswash survived the air crash

In a catastrophe that reduced a gleaming aircraft to charred debris and claimed 241 lives, one man walked out alive — Viswash Kumar Ramesh.

The 40-year-old British-Indian businessman was seated in 11A on Air India Flight AI-171 when it lifted off from Ahmedabad’s Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport at 1:38 pm on Thursday. Minutes later, the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner — bound for London Gatwick — plunged from the sky, tearing through the southern wing of a residential doctors’ hostel in Meghaninagar.

Rescue workers were stunned to find him alive. “I still don’t know how I’m breathing. How I am even alive..Everyone around me died,” Viswash whispered to a nurse at the Civil Hospital in Ahmedabad. Seated near the emergency exit, Viswash believes the location saved his life.

Don’t know how I am alive

I still don’t know how I’m breathing. How I am even alive… I didn’t jump. The seat flew out with me strapped in. — Viswash Kumar Ramesh, the lone survivor

Moments after take-off, the aircraft shuddered violently. Passengers screamed. The fuselage was split open due to the impact with the hostel building. And then came the defining moment of barely a second when Ramesh’s seat, still bolted to a portion of the cabin floor, was hurled free of the disintegrating plane. “I didn’t jump. The seat flew out with me strapped in,” he said.

Then came a deafening explosion. Thrown clear of the fireball, his seat slammed into soft ground just yards from the wreckage. Dazed, burned, and soaked in blood, he unbuckled himself and limped through the smoke.

Above him, flames consumed the aircraft and everyone on board, including, he fears, his elder brother Ajay, who had been seated just across the aisle in 11J.

Rescuers say they saw him staggering, barely conscious, his shirt stained with blood, his skin blistered from heat. “He looked like he had risen from the ashes,” said a rescuer.

Ahmedabad Police Commissioner GS Malik confirmed the near-unbelievable news to the press hours later: “We have found one survivor from the crash — seat 11A. He is under treatment at the hospital. We are still identifying the dead.”

In the trauma ward, sedated and bandaged, he keeps asking the same question: “Did my brother make it?” The two had been in Gujarat visiting extended family. They were flying back together to the UK, where they co-owned a small grocery business near Birmingham.

Doctors say Viswash’s injuries, while serious, are not life-threatening. But his psychological trauma may take time to pass.

India