Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, a 40-year-old British man, sat in Seat 11A in the first economy-class row behind business class, a window seat allowing a terrifying view as the plane he was on sank from the sky shortly after takeoff, crashing into a building and bursting into flames.
The crash apparently killed everyone else on board.
Ramesh was returning to London from Ahmedabad in western India, Thursday, when the Air India Boeing 787-8 commercial passenger jet crashed. Authorities have recovered 265 bodies with more expected to be found.
At first, officials declared there were no survivors, but local video showed an agitated man in a stained white T-shirt walking away from the crash with a slight limp, heading towards an ambulance while smoke billowed overhead.
He was later identified as Ramesh, and a photograph of him in a hospital bed later in the day shows injuries and blood on the left side of his face — the side that faced the window.
Authorities confirmed Ramesh was one of the passengers aboard Air India Flight 171. He showed local media his folded boarding pass which matched the passenger’s name, flight, and seat assignment in the plane’s manifest.
“Thirty seconds after take-off, there was a loud noise and then the plane crashed. It all happened so quickly,” Ramesh told the Hindustan Times from a hospital bed.
“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. Someone grabbed hold of me and put me in an ambulance and brought me to the hospital,” he said.
Officials said he suffered “impact injuries” to his chest, face and feet. He was in a general ward bed rather than a specialized trauma unit, suggesting his injuries were relatively minor.
While the seemingly miraculous survival is a wonder, as well as one glimmer of good news amid an enormous tragedy, for Ramesh it remained a day of loss and pain. He had been returning to Britain from visiting family with his older brother, Ajay Kumar Ramesh.
His brother was sitting in a different row from him.
Ajay Valgi, Ramesh’s cousin in England, told the BBC that Ramesh phoned his family and told them he was “fine” but that he didn’t know where his brother was.
Another brother, Nayan Kumar Ramesh, relayed a brief phone call with Ramesh: “He said, ‘I have no idea how I exited the plane.’”
There were 169 Indian citizens, 53 British citizens, seven Portuguese and one Canadian as passengers on the flight destined for London’s Gatwick airport, Air India said. Eleven children were on board. The Canadian has been identified as
Nirali Sureshkumar Patel, a dentist from Mississauga, Ont.
Officials said there were 12 crew members on board as well as the 230 passengers. Many others on the ground were killed and injured. Police said the jet smashed into a hostel that was used by local doctors.
Ahmedabad’s police commissioner, G.S. Malik, told ANI News: “The police found one survivor in seat 11A. He has been in the hospital and is under treatment…. The death toll may increase as the flight crashed in a residential area.”
Ramesh was born in India but has lived in England for many years. He lives in Leicester, where he has a wife and child and an extended family, British media reported.
How he alone survived is not known.
Seat 11A is on the left side of the plane, beside an emergency exit and behind a kitchen galley that separates the business-class cabin from the cheaper seats further into the plane.
It is not considered a particularly desirable seat. It is close to the kitchen, which can be noisy, and it has no floor space for bags during takeoff and landing, according to Seatguru.com. While there is more legroom because it is an exit row, that comes at a cost: the tray table is nested in the armrest, making the armrest immoveable and the seat narrower.
Ramesh’s boarding pass says his flight was scheduled for departure at 1:10 p.m., on Thursday, an hour after his boarding call. It was 29 minutes late when it took off.
It was less than a minute after taking off that the air traffic controllers received a Mayday call from the plane, an international emergency distress signal, as it sank back to the ground, bursting into flames and sending up clouds of dark smoke that were clearly visible from the airport.
The plane is seen in videos sinking through the air, looking more like a planned landing than an erratic crash, but rather than finding a runway, it smashed through a building on the outskirts of the airport.
The front of the plane penetrated deep into the building, with only its tail sticking out.
Ramesh’s brother is still unaccounted for.
The cause of the crash is still under investigation. While authorities want to know what caused the plane to descend, there will also be great interest in how one man managed to walk away from the carnage.
• Email: ahumphreys@postmedia.com | Twitter: AD_Humphreys
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