New Delhi: Surrounded by bodies, the 40-year-old occupant of seat 11A walked out of the ball of fire that was the AI171, leaving behind 241 dead. The Ahmedabad-London flight crashed minutes after takeoff at 1.39 pm Thursday.
In addition to the 241 people on board, five MBBS students, a postgraduate resident doctor, and a doctor’s wife—all of whom were having lunch in the doctors’ mess the plane crashed into—were killed. Many others were injured. The sole survivor, British national Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, walked away with minor chest injuries and a burn on his left arm. Even his brother, 45-year-old Ajay Kumar Ramesh, seated a few rows away, died in the crash.
He was taken to the Civil Hospital, in Asarwa in Ahmedabad, where the PM met and spoke to him in the general ward.
Vishwash told HT, “30 seconds after take-off, there was a loud noise and then the plane crashed. It all happened so quickly. 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.”
Many are drawing parallels between Ramesh and Bruce Willis’ character David Dunn, who walked away unscathed from a train crash that killed everyone else in M. Night Shyamalan’s 2000 film Unbreakable.
38-year-old British national Ramesh Vishwaskumar, who was sitting on seat number 11A, is now reportedly the only survivor of the Air India plane crash.
According to reports, he saved his life by jumping from the emergency exit. pic.twitter.com/A6DlVbQoKJ
— Global Index (@TheGlobal_Index) June 12, 2025
Ramesh was in India for a few days to visit his family and was going back to the UK along with his brother. He said he has lived in London for 20 years, adding that his wife and child, too, live in London.
He said that his brother Ajay was seated in a different row on the plane. “We visited Diu. He was travelling with me and I can’t find him anymore. Please help me find him,” he has appealed.
#WATCH | PM Modi visits Civil Hospital in Ahmedabad and meets the lone survivor of the Air India plane crash and other people injured in the accident pic.twitter.com/0OYwh90dNh
— ANI (@ANI) June 13, 2025
Air India has said 169 of the 230 passengers were Indian nationals, 53 British nationals, seven Portuguese, and one Canadian. Officials said the aircraft lost altitude soon after taking off at around 1.30 pm Thursday. It crashed into the residential quarters of BJ Medical College doctors in the Meghaninagar area before going up in flames. The pilot had issued a ‘Mayday’ distress call, denoting a full emergency, soon after takeoff, but the Air Traffic Control was unable to contact the plane after that.
5 other miracle survivors in aviation history
This is not the first such miracle. There have been 5 other instances in aviation history when only one person has survived a plane crash.
In August 1987, a McDonnell Douglas MD-82 carrying 149 passengers and six crew crashed shortly after takeoff from Detroit Metropolitan Airport due to pilot error. All but one perished—a 4-year-old girl, Cecelia Cichan, who survived with severe burns and multiple fractures.
In 2009, 12-year-old Bahia Bakari, lived through a Yemenia Airways crash that killed 152. She was found clinging to floating debris in the Indian Ocean by local fishermen and rescuers.
George Lamson Jr was the sole survivor of a Lockheed L-188 Electra crash in 1985 that killed 70 people. Then just 17, Lamson was hurled from the aircraft in his seat as it broke apart into flames over a highway shortly after takeoff.
The fourth lone survivor was James Polehinke, the first officer aboard a Bombardier CRJ100 that crashed in Kentucky in 2006, killing 49 people.
More recently, in March 2018, a Cubana de Aviación flight crashed shortly after takeoff near Havana, killing 112 people. Of the four initially found alive, three later died in hospital. The sole survivor, critically injured, spent nearly a year recovering and was discharged in May 2019.