The extraordinary escape of the lone surviving passenger of the Air India crash

CNBC

17 hours ago

The survivor of the Air India Flight 171 crash Thursday revealed he miraculously survived by escaping through a broken emergency exit.
There were 242 people on board the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, bound for London, that crashed shortly after takeoff in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad, smashing in a fiery blast into a medical college hostel, killing and injuring more people on the ground.
The plane crashed into a hostel for the B.J. Medical College and Civil Hospital (BJMC). As a result, four students at BJMC died, six relatives of resident doctors died and 24 are undergoing treatment, the Federation of All India Medical Associations (FAIMA) Doctors Association said Friday.
It was the worst aviation disaster in a decade. Ramesh Viswashkumar, 40, was the sole person aboard the doomed flight to survive.
"I can't explain. Everything was happening in my eye. I can't explain," Viswashkumar, a British national of Indian origin, told DD News, an Indian state-owned broadcaster Friday.
Police said Viswashkumar was in seat 11A, near an emergency exit. Viswashkumar, visibly cut up from the crash, said he was able to escape moments before the blast when the emergency door broke.
"Emergency door is broken. My seat is broken. Then I see the space a little bit and I will try to come out," he told DD News. He was able to get out as the aircraft caught fire.
"Little bit of fire, after I'm out, then blast," he recalled.
Footage of the crash showed a massive ball of fire as the plane's full fuel tanks exploded, filling the sky with thick black smoke.
Survivability is "extremely limited" in plane crashes like the one that happened in Ahmedabad yesterday, said Trevor Bock, a safety consultant at Aviation Safety Asia.
A large, heavy aircraft will be torn apart by the enormous amount of energy it carries as the plane hits the ground, he said. "We're talking thousands of kilograms of weight," adding that the plane, which has just taken off, had "a lot of fuel."
Viswashkumar explained that he and his brother had been staying in India for the last eight or nine months and he was bound back home to London, where his family lived.
Viswashkumar told Reuters in Hindi that within a minute after takeoff, the plane felt like it came to a standstill in the air and the green and white cabin lights turned on.
"I could feel engine thrust increasing to go up but it crashed with speed into the building," he told Reuters.
He explained that the side of the plane he was on landed on the ground floor of the hostel.
"I could see that there was space outside the aircraft, so when my door broke I tried to escape through a little space and I did. On the opposite side (of plane) was the building wall, so nobody could have escaped. The plane crashed there. There was some space where I landed," he said.
"I don't know how I managed to escape. It was in front of my eyes that the air hostess and others (died)," he added.
Viswashkumar's left hand was burned. An ambulance took him to a hospital where he remains in recovery.
He is "doing well" but "psychologically disturbed" by the event, according to the medical director of the Civil Hospital, where he is being treated.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with Viswashkumar in the hospital Friday.
Viswashkumar summed up his extraordinary survival in a few words: "It's miracle, everything," he told DD News.
Viswashkumar's brother in the United Kingdom told Sky News, NBC News' international partner, that "this is a miracle that he survived."
"But what other miracle for my other brother?" he said, referring to their third brother who was on the flight with Viswashkumar.
In total, there were 230 passengers and 12 crew members on board, Air India said, and 241 were killed. Among the passengers were 169 Indian nationals, 53 British nationals, a Canadian national and seven Portuguese nationals.