‘Bodies all around me’: How lone survivor in seat 11A of doomed Air India flight walked away from crash that killed 241

An Air India commercial airliner carrying 242 people crashed within seconds of taking off, smashing into a residential area of Ahmedabad, India, according to aviation authorities. The tragic airliner crash killed everyone on board the Boeing airliner — except one miraculous lone survivor.

Air India Flight AI 171 took off from the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport in Ahmedabad to London Gatwick at 1:38 p.m. local time on Thursday.

‘I don’t believe how I survived. For some time, I thought I was also going to die.’

The airliner — a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner — had “lost height just seconds after departure and impacted a neighborhood to the southwest of the airport,” Flightradar24 reported. The outlet noted that the Air India plane reached a maximum recorded barometric altitude of 625 feet before crashing on the ground.

The commercial aircraft crashed into a building and burst into flames just moments after taking off from the airport.

Boeing released a statement that read: “We are in contact with Air India regarding Flight 171 and stand ready to support them. Our thoughts are with the passengers, crew, first responders, and all affected.”

Indian aviation officials told the BBC that rescue teams had recovered the digital flight data recorder — one of the aircraft’s two black boxes — from the rooftop of the building, which is reported to be a facility of a medical college.

An investigation into the crash has been launched by India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau. A team of U.S. investigators led by the National Transportation Safety Board will also travel to India to assist in determining what caused the deadly crash, according to the BBC.

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Photo by SAM PANTHAKY/AFP via Getty Images)

Air India said in a statement that 241 people aboard the plane perished, with only a lone survivor of the aviation tragedy. Air India stated that the passengers on board were 169 Indian nationals, 53 British nationals, seven Portuguese nationals, and one Canadian national.

CNN reported that the Air India crash is one of the deadliest air travel disasters since 2014, when Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 went missing.

According to the Hindustan Times, the lone survivor has been identified as Vishwash Kumar Ramesh — a 40-year-old British national of Indian origin.

“Thirty seconds after takeoff, there was a loud noise, and then the plane crashed. It all happened so quickly,” Ramesh recalled.

“When I got up, there were bodies all around me. I was scared. I stood up and ran. There were pieces of the plane all around me,” Ramesh recounted in an interview with Hindustan Times from a bed at the Civil Hospital in Ahmedabad. “Someone grabbed hold of me and put me in an ambulance and brought me to the hospital.”

Video has reportedly surfaced of a bloodied and limping Ramesh being escorted to an ambulance.

According to Reuters, Ramesh told Indian state broadcaster DD News, “I don’t believe how I survived. For some time, I thought I was also going to die. But when I opened my eyes, I realized I was alive, and I tried to unbuckle myself from the seat and escape from where I could. It was in front of my eyes that the air hostess and others [died].”

Ramesh explained, “The side of the plane I was in landed on the ground, and I could see that there was space outside the aircraft, so when my door broke, I tried to escape through it, and I did. The opposite side of the aircraft was blocked by the building wall, so nobody could have come out of there.”

Ramesh had traveled to India with his brother, Ajay, who was seated in 11J on the right side of the plane before dying in the horrific plane crash, according to the New York Times.

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Aviation experts have weighed in on whether the location of Ramesh’s seat helped him miraculously survive the plane crash that killed every other passenger. Ramesh was sitting in seat 11A — a window seat in the emergency exit row located in front of the wing.

“In this particular instance, because the passenger was sitting adjacent to the emergency exit, this was obviously the safest seat on the day,” Ron Bartsch — chairman at the Australia-based Avlaw Aviation Consulting — told Reuters.

Mitchell Fox — a director at Flight Safety Foundation — told the outlet, “Each accident is different, and it is impossible to predict survivability based on seat location.”

The Wall Street Journal noted, “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.”

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Photo by SAM PANTHAKY/AFP via Getty Images

In 2015, Time magazine conducted a study of 17 airline accidents that occurred over 35 years by utilizing FAA data to determine if certain seats on commercial airliners are safer than others. The analysis revealed that the seats in the rear third of the aircraft had a 32% fatality rate, seats in the front third had a 38% fatality rate, and seats in the overwing section had a 39% fatality rate.

According to Time, “Looking at row position, we found that the middle seats in the rear of the aircraft had the best outcomes (28% fatality rate). The worst-faring seats were on the aisle in the middle third of the cabin (44% fatality rate).”

Alison Duquette — a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration — told the Huffington Post in 2017: “Each incident or crash is unique. There is no safest seat.”

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