The man in seat 11A who walked away from the Air India crash

Britain’s Viswashkumar Ramesh says he doesn’t know why he survived, while close to 300 others died.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Viswashkumar Ramesh, the crash’s sole survivor, at a hospital in Ahmedabad on Friday. Picture: Narendra Modi Youtube/ AFP

There was nothing unusual about the first moments after takeoff. Then, Viswashkumar Ramesh said, it felt like the plane got stuck in midair.

It wasn’t clear yet, but Air India Flight 171 was going down.

Green and white lights suddenly illuminated the cabin. The next thing Ramesh knew, he was on the ground. Seated next to an emergency exit on the plane’s left side, he made his way outside.

He saw that the right side of the plane had crashed into a building, blocking exits there. Then a massive fireball sent flames and black smoke billowing into the sky.

“I don’t know how I survived,” Ramesh said, recounting the scene in an interview with India’s public broadcaster from his hospital bed. The British national, who had wounds on his face but appeared to have avoided major injury, is the crash’s lone survivor.

Across the world’s most populous nation, Ramesh has become known as the miracle of window seat 11A. The Boeing 787 Dreamliner heading from the Indian city of Ahmedabad to London on Thursday crashed soon after takeoff, killing the other 241 people aboard and at least 24 others on the ground, including students in a medical-college dormitory the plane struck.

Ramesh, who is in late 30s, joins a short list of known sole survivors of major plane crashes. Some of the roughly 14 others have reported intense survivor’s guilt, involving deep depression, after cheating death seemingly at random.

Still, the survival of Ramesh, whom Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Friday, is one of the few flickers of hope in an otherwise devastating scene in Ahmedabad.

The hospital treating Ramesh is part of the same medical college as the damaged dormitory. One doctor said the hospital, which has peeling paint and no airconditioning, was treating about 100 injured, with half from nearby student housing. A few were in intensive care.

Nearby, in a classroom hastily converted into a DNA testing centre, family members gave blood or did cheek swabs to help identify the dead. About a dozen staffers in white coats, blue surgical masks and hair nets filled in forms as weeping people shared photos and information about family members on the flight.

Though police blocked off the streets, the plane’s tail could still be seen jutting out of the dorm’s second floor, an exposed layer of bricks holding up a loose plane tire.

It hinted at the nightmare inside experienced by people including Sanket Valiya. The 19-year-old medical student was eating lunch with a friend on the first floor when everything above him collapsed.

A pillar pinned his right shoulder to the ground. He heard his friend crying. He called for help for about 45 minutes, but no one came. “I closed my eyes and thought, ‘This is the end.’”

People finally extracted him from the rubble, but he kept his eyes closed until he got to the hospital. He has fractures and cuts, but is expected to recover. Valiya doesn’t know what happened to his friend.

The mother of both Viswashkumar Ramesh and his brother Ajay Ramesh, who is believed to not have survived, boards a mini bus to travel to India. Picture: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Dr Jhanvi Balchandani, a 26-year-old postgraduate medical student in microbiology, said some students survived by jumping onto mattresses arranged on the ground by students in neighbouring buildings. She had feared for her little brother, a fourth-year student, but he was luckily delayed at another building.

Two people that didn’t make it out were Lalita Behan’s 2-year-old daughter and mother-in-law. Behan, a dormitory cook, was downstairs. She tried reaching her family members upstairs, “but there was too much smoke and the fire was so massive,” she said through tears at the DNA testing centre.

Both are missing, presumed dead. “I don’t want to see their bodies,” she said. “I don’t think I will live if I see the dead body of my baby.”

Ramesh, the sole survivor from the plane, is originally from the Indian island of Diu. On the flight were 14 other people from Diu, including Ramesh’s brother Ajay, said Dipak Deugi, head of their home village.

Ramesh, his parents and brothers had settled in Britain over the past two decades, Deugi said. Ramesh had run a garment factory in the English city of Leicester, but closed it during the Covid-19 pandemic and returned to Diu to run a fishing-boat business. He was on his way back to Leicester to see his wife and family, Deugi said.

According to British corporate records, Ramesh was a British citizen born in August 1986, making him 38 years old. The records listed him as the sole director of RMV Fashions Limited, a textiles manufacturer in Leicester without any corporate records since 2022.

Deugi said he made a hospital visit to see Ramesh, who was in good condition. Ramesh’s family members from Britain will soon arrive too. Meanwhile, their island village is mourning.

So are many in Leicester, where 16% of residents in 2021 reported India as their country of birth. On Friday, more than a dozen family members clustered around a family home there, with more inside.

This picture taken and released by the Indian Press Information Bureau shows Narendra Modi visiting the site after Air India flight 171 crashed

A cousin, Hiren Kantilal, said Ramesh had called his father just moments after the plane crashed.

“I don’t know how to get out of the plane,” he told his dad, according to the cousin. Ramesh said he wanted to wait for his brother, the cousin said.

Ramesh’s brother was also in an exit row, but on the side of the plane wedged into the building, said Dheeraj Lal Somabhai, a community leader in Diu and friend of Ramesh. He said he has spoken to Ramesh since the crash and was visiting families affected by the tragedy with the message: “Whatever happened, nobody other than God would have been able to do anything.”

More than a dozen large plane crashes have had only one survivor — and no clear pattern as to how or why, including in Ramesh’s case. In a 2014 CNN documentary, “Sole Survivor,” some recounted wrestling with guilt, depression and other mental-health issues.

George Lamson Jr. was a teenager when he was launched onto a street, still strapped to his seat, after Galaxy Airline Flight 203 crashed soon after takeoff in 1985. The Reno, Nev., accident killed all other 70 aboard, including his father.

Lamson counted 13 sole survivors from other big crashes. He eventually reached out to them all. “I never thought anyone else could understand, except these people,” he wrote in a first-person piece for CNN. “What I discovered is, I was able to break through some mental barriers by opening up to fellow sole survivors.”

Lamson declined to comment for this article, but indicated he was open to speaking with Ramesh. “My heart goes out to the survivor in India,” he wrote in a Facebook post.

Wall Street Journal