Tony Cable, a former senior air crash investigator, has one piece of advice for Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, the sole survivor of the Air India plane disaster: “Buy a lottery ticket straight away.”
The 40-year-old Briton walked away from the wreckage of flight AI171 after it crashed less than a minute after takeoff from Ahmedabad to London on Thursday, killing 241 other passengers and crew and dozens more on the ground.
Surviving with minor physical injuries seemed miraculous, but the focus on how Ramesh may have stayed alive turned to his seat on the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner – 11A, an emergency exit seat near the front of the plane and close to one of the strongest parts of the fuselage known as the “wing box”.
After the plane slammed into buildings about 30 seconds after takeoff, Ramesh thought he was dead, but when he realised he was alive he saw an opening in the fuselage. “I managed to unbuckle myself, used my leg to push through that opening, and crawled out,” he said. It was not clear whether this opening was the door or a rupture in the fuselage.
“The aircraft was pretty nose up when it hit the buildings,” said Cable, a former senior inspector of air accidents at the UK Air Accidents Investigations Branch. “It has presumably broken open in an area of the fuselage adjacent to this guy and fortuitously he has popped out without major injury.”
Ramesh’s seat had space, rather than seats, immediately in front of it, which may have given him more room for escape than many of his fellow passengers. It may also have meant that while the passengers in front of him may have been crushed together on impact, he avoided that fate, Prof John McDermid, Lloyd’s Register chair of safety at the University of York, said.
“My suspicion is that because of the nature of the impact, he was in a strong part of the airplane at the front edge of the wing,” he added. “There is not just the fuselage, but the extra structure of the wing to protect from the compression of the fuselage.”
“It’s possible that the impact loosened the door and he could kick it out and get out,” McDermid said. “The external door was only just in front of him so he didn’t have far to go.”
But before Ramesh could even consider an escape, he had to have the luck to survive the impact of the crash.
“If you’ve got an accident like this, where you’ve got an aircraft full of fuel and it’s making a crash landing off the airport into the built environment, that’s unlikely to be a survivable accident,” said Prof Ed Galea, an expert in fire safety and evacuation at the University of Greenwich. “The fact that anyone has survived is miraculous.
“He seems to have been lucky in that: a) he survived the trauma of the impact, b) he wasn’t severely injured in that crash, and c) he was sitting right by the No 2 exit. Whether he used that or exited via a rupture that was close by, is not clear. But he was very close to an exit point.”
Galea has previously carried out research on plane crashes which found that, in less devastating crashes, people sitting within five rows of a serviceable exit have a greater chance of surviving than dying while those more than five rows away were more likely to perish. He said he always tries to reserve a seat within five rows of an emergency exit.
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Galea said other passengers may have also survived the impact but were too injured to evacuate or were not close enough to an exit point. Passengers who did not adopt the brace position may have struck their heads on the seats in front of them knocking them unconscious, but there were no seats immediately in front of Ramesh.
While the structure of the plane may have given him a chance at survival, Ramesh still needed to move fast to take that chance, said McDermid. “If he hadn’t got out in a very few seconds, he would have been unlikely to make it out because of the fireball,” he added.
The plane had enough fuel on board to carry it to London Gatwick and this appeared to ignite upon impact.
Galea said Ramesh may have found himself exiting in front of the fireball if the aviation fuel had been pouring from the ruptured tanks in a rearward direction.
“He was a very, very unlucky man being on that airplane, but he was also a very, very lucky man being able to get out,” McDermid concluded.
