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_{Man Survives Air India Crash in Seat 11A—Was It Luck, or the Seat That Saved Him?}

Ahmedabad, India — Amid the smoldering wreckage of the Air India Boeing 787 that crashed near Ahmedabad International Airport, a miracle emerged from the chaos: a lone survivor pulled from the debris, dazed but alive. His seat? 11A.

The survivor suffered facial and chest injuries.

The crash, which claimed the lives of more than 290 people, is now one of India’s deadliest aviation disasters. Yet Vishwashkumar Ramesh, 38, walked away—barely. Found among the charred remains of the Dreamliner, Ramesh was taken to the hospital after being helped by emergency crews who discovered him wandering in shock, surrounded by destruction.

The moment the plane exploded. How a passenger survived this is nothing short of a miracle.

"When I got up, there were bodies all around me," Ramesh later recounted to local reporters. "I was scared. I got up and ran. There were pieces of the plane lying all around me. Someone held me down, took me to an ambulance, and took me to the hospital." He doesn’t remember how he survived or how he escaped the twisted fuselage. “I have no idea how I got out of the plane,” his brother Nayan Kumar told the BBC.

The question now haunting investigators and aviation experts alike: Did seat 11A play a role in his survival?

A seemingly ordinary seat in economy class, 11A is located in an emergency exit row—known for extra legroom, but also its rigid armrests and lack of floor storage. According to SeatGuru, it's adjacent to the galley, which can be noisy, and the tray table folds into the seat's arm. Functional, but nothing that screams "life-saving." Yet its proximity to the emergency exit may have made all the difference.

Aviation journalist Andreas Spaeth isn’t surprised by survival in unlikely circumstances. "It's not incredibly rare," he told the press "There are several examples." He pointed to the 1985 Japan Airlines disaster in which four passengers survived out of 524—each of them seated near the tail. In another crash in Pakistan in 2020, two passengers out of 99 lived to tell the tale.

Survivor Vishwashkumar Ramesh was sitting in seat 11A.

Still, Spaeth cautions against drawing definitive conclusions. “There is no safest seat. It depends entirely on the crash—where the plane hits, how it disintegrates, or whether it breaks mid-air or belly-lands. Every incident is unique.”

In this case, the aircraft reportedly approached the airport for an emergency landing before it clipped rooftops on the outskirts of Ahmedabad. “If there hadn’t been houses in the path,” Spaeth speculated, “it might have made it to a field.”

But for one man in seat 11A, fate—and perhaps a fortunate bit of cabin geography—granted him a second chance. As investigators comb through the debris, that miracle stands as a solemn reminder of life’s randomness and resilience in the face of catastrophe.