Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, June 13: Amidst the ruins all around him, only one person walked out of the shattered London-bound Air India Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner.
British-Indian national Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, the 40-year-old businessman based in the UK, seated in 11A, walked out of the wreckage dazed, bloodied and burned, but miraculously alive. His brother, seated in 11J across the aisle, however, was not as fortunate.
The crash, India’s deadliest single-aircraft disaster in decades, occurred at 1:38 pm on Thursday. The aircraft, bound for London Gatwick, went down seconds after departure, striking a multi-storey hostel housing resident doctors of BJ Medical College in the Meghaninagar area. Among the dead were 229 passengers and all 12 crew members, and 24 people on the ground, at least 10 of them medical students.
“Everything happened in front of my eyes. I thought I would die,” Mr Ramesh, who was visited among others by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi at his Ahmedabad civil hospital bed, said.
According to preliminary air traffic control logs, the Dreamliner took off from runway 23 at 13:38 IST. It climbed normally for a few seconds before the pilot radioed a Mayday distress call. Eyewitnesses near the airport perimeter reported hearing abnormal engine noise, followed by a steep nosedive. Seconds later, the aircraft slammed into the hostel’s southern wing.
Seat 11A is positioned in the first row of economy class, directly behind the business cabin and close to the emergency exits on the left side. When the aircraft hit the ground, the front-left section, including 11A, collapsed into the ground floor of the hostel building, not the upper levels where the aircraft’s main body suffered its worst destruction.
“The side where I was seated fell into the ground floor of the building,” Mr Ramesh recounted. “There was some space. When the door broke, I saw that space and I just jumped out.” Mr Ramesh was lucky. The section opposite him, where the plane had rammed into a wall, was sealed off by debris and fire. None of the occupants from those rows survived.
“The door must’ve broken on impact,” he said. “There was a wall on the opposite side, but near me, it was open. I ran. I don’t know how.” Photos from the site confirm his account. The midsection and tail of the plane were reduced to charred rubble. But the forward fuselage had partially broken off before catching fire, allowing a narrow exit path.
“I don’t know how I came out of it alive,” Mr Ramesh said. “For a while, I thought I was about to die. But when I opened my eyes, I saw I was alive. And I opened my seat belt and got out of there. The airhostess and aunty uncle all died before my eyes.”
Mr Ramesh is now in bed 11 of Ward B7 at Ahmedabad Civil Hospital, under 24-hour monitoring. His ward is guarded by the Gujarat ATS and the city crime branch. Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in Ahmedabad early today. He visited the crash site and later the hospital, where he met Mr Ramesh.
“He asked me what happened,” Mr Ramesh said. “I told him I don’t know how I lived. It all happened so fast.”
Mr Ramesh said the crash happened within 10 seconds of the plane taking off. “It felt like the plane got stuck. Then suddenly, the lights came on, and right after that, it accelerated — and then it crashed,” he recalled.
Seated on the side that landed in an open area rather than the building, Mr Ramesh said the ground near his side was flat. “As soon as the door near me broke, I saw that the ground was level, so I escaped through there,” he added. His left hand suffered minor burns, but he survived. “The side that hit the building — no one could have gotten out from there,” he said.
His another brother Nayan Kumar Ramesh, called his escape a “miracle” adding that Vishwash called his father in Leicester moments after the crash to say he had survived. “He video-called my dad as he crashed and said, ‘Oh the plane’s crashed. I don’t know where my brother is. I don’t see any other passengers. I don’t know how I’m alive, how I exited the plane’,” he said.
