The astonishing stories of five air crash sole survivors

Telegraph

a day ago

A British national has been named as the only survivor of the Air India disaster in Ahmedabad.
Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, 40, from London, was returning to the UK after visiting family with his brother, who was also on the flight in a different row. Remarkable footage taken shortly after the crash shows a bloodied Ramesh walking through a crowd.
'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,' he told the Hindustan Times from hospital.
Throughout history, there have been at least 100 examples of sole survivors emerging from the wreckage of air disasters, covering military, cargo and commercial aircraft. The first example was on March 17, 1929, when Lou Foote, the 34-year-old pilot of a sightseeing plane, survived a crash in Newark, New Jersey.
What is notable is the young age of many of these survivors. Of the 77 whose ages are known, the average age is 24 and the oldest is 52. The youngest, a Thai national who survived a Vietnam Airlines crash in 2003, was just 14 months old.
Given the inevitably high death tolls, each story of a sole survivor is both remarkable and tragic, particularly when there is a child involved. The following five are among the best-known case studies in aviation history.
On Christmas Eve 1971, Juliane Koepcke boarded a domestic flight in Peru with her mother, Maria. They did so against the advice of Koepcke's father, Hans-Wilhelm, who warned of LANSA's poor safety record.
The plane was struck by lightning in mid-flight and the plane rapidly began to fall apart, before losing altitude. Kopecke recalls the experience of falling, while still strapped into her row of seats, for 10,000ft (3,000m) into the thick of the Amazon rainforest.
Miraculously, Juliane Koepcke survived the fall with an eye injury, a cut on her right arm, a broken collarbone and concussion. There are various theories as to how she survived the fall, but it is thought that the updraught of the thunderstorm, the dense canopy of the forest and the fact she was attached to a row of three seats – acting as a kind of crude parachute – could have contributed.
She spent 11 days following a creek within the jungle, during which she suffered a botfly larvae infestation in her wounded arm. On the ninth day, she came across a lumberjack encampment where she was offered rudimentary medical assistance (gasoline was poured on her arm) and put on an 11-hour canoe to the nearest inhabited area, where she was airlifted to hospital. Her mother did not survive the accident.
Koepcke, now 70, went on to become an expert in mammalogy, specialising in bats. Today she works as a librarian at the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology in Munich.
Vesna Vulović is believed to be the person to have survived the highest fall without a parachute, at an altitude of 6.31 miles (33,333ft).
When a briefcase bomb exploded on the JAT flight, at this point at cruising altitude, the plane broke apart over a remote Czechoslovakian village. It is believed that Vulović survived because while all of the other passengers and flight crew were blown out of the aircraft, Vulović was unwittingly pinned inside the fuselage by a food trolley.
Because the fuselage landed in a thickly wooded, snow-covered mountainside, it is thought that the impact was softened. The fact that Vulović had a history of low blood pressure, causing her to pass out as the cabin depressurised, could have also helped her to survive the fall.
After the crash, Vulović suffered a fractured skull, cerebral haemorrhage, two broken legs and three broken vertebrae, as well as a fractured pelvis and several broken ribs. Within a year of the accident she had regained the ability to walk, although she suffered from a limp for the rest of her life.
In a later interview with the New York Times, she was asked why she thought she survived the accident.
'Serbian stubbornness,' she said. 'And a childhood diet of chocolate, spinach and fish oil.'
The deadliest accident to date with a sole survivor (a record which may be revised once the final death toll of the Air India disaster is confirmed) occurred shortly after take-off in Detroit.
Then aged just four, Cecelia Cichan was travelling home to Tempe, Arizona alongside her mother, father and six-year-old brother. While searching the wreckage, firemen found Cichan still strapped into her seat, having sustained third degree burns and fractures to her skull, collarbone and left leg.
As the subject of intense media interest, Cichan received more than $150,000 in donations that was put into a trust. In an interview with the Daily Mirror in 2012, she said: 'I never go on a day without thinking about the people on Flight 255,' she said. 'It's kind of hard not to think about it. When I look in the mirror, I have visual scars'.
She had an aeroplane tattooed onto her wrist, as a daily reminder of the tragedy that she survived.
The Yemenia Airbus A310-324 had been in service for 19 years, accumulating 53,000 flight hours when it crashed off the north coast of Grande Comore, Comoros, an island nation in the Indian Ocean. Later investigations found that, amid strong winds, the airline stalled and crashed into the sea.
Since the Comoros had no sea-rescue capacity, French military aircraft and a boat from neighbouring islands Réunion and Mayotte were sent to conduct a formal search effort. The plane wreckage was found off the coastal town of Mitsamiouli, and among the bodies was 12-year-old Bahia Bakari, who was seen holding onto a piece of debris in the water. It later emerged she had been clinging onto it for 13 hours.
With the help of local fishermen, Bakari was rescued and taken to a hospital in Paris with a fractured collarbone, hypothermia and cuts to her face.
In the early morning on May 12, an Afriqiyah Airways Airbus A330-202 approached Tripoli Airport in Libya. The conditions were calm, with good visibility, and the crew was cleared to continue their approach.
As the aircraft approached the runway, however, the crew was alerted that the weather had deteriorated and that the airport was shrouded in mist. After one failed landing attempt, the aircraft crashed just beside the runway at a speed of 302mph.
On board were passengers from several countries including the United Kingdom, France and the United States. The sole survivor was a nine-year-old Dutch boy named Ruben van Assouw, who had been on safari with his family (all of whom died in the accident). The child had multiple fractures in both legs, but no life threatening injuries. It is believed he survived because he was flung from the wreckage moments before it burst into flames.
Van Assouw's survival story was partial inspiration for Ann Napolitano's coming-of-age novel, Dear Edward, about the sole survivor of a plane crash. The book was later adapted into a TV series.