We’ve all seen the footage of Vishwash Kumar Ramesh AKA the luckiest man on the planet walking away from the wreckage of Air India flight AI171, but initially not even he could remember how he managed to escape the plane while everyone else on board died.
It seems it’s all started to come back to him now though, as Vishwash, who was sitting by the emergency exit in Seat 11A, has given a couple of interviews to Indian publications from his hospital bed.
Telling his story to the Hindustani Times, Vishwash mentioned how the lights on the plane “started flickering.”
He said: “When the flight took off, within five to 10 seconds it felt like it was stuck in the air. Suddenly, the lights started flickering – green and white – then the plane rammed into some establishment that was there.”
On how he managed to get out, Vishwash said that the section of the plane he was sitting in landed on the ground, instead of hitting the roof of a building. According to Vishwash: “When I saw the exit, I thought I could come out. I tried, and I did. Maybe the people who were on the other side of the plane weren’t able to.”
Vishwash saw the tragedy unfolding around him before getting himself to safety.
“I don’t know how I survived. I saw people dying in front of my eyes – the air hostesses, and two people I saw near me … I walked out of the rubble.”
“Thirty seconds after take-off, there was a loud noise and then the plane crashed. It all happened so quickly.”
Recalling how “there were bodies all around” him, Vishwash continued: “I was scared. I stood up and ran. There were pieces of the plane all around me. Someone grabbed hold of me and put me in an ambulance and brought me to the hospital.”
In another interview with DD News, Vishwash explained how he managed to exit the plane through a broken emergency door.
“The side of the plane I was in landed on the ground, and I could see that there was space outside the aircraft, so when my door broke, I tried to escape through it and I did.
“The opposite side of the aircraft was blocked by the building wall, so nobody could have come out of there.”
Vishwash reportedly suffered chest, eyes and feet injuries on impact, but all things considered, his injuries are fairly minor. After all, he was walking on his own away from the wreckage and even seemed to be shooing people away who were trying to help him.
Dr. Rajnish Patel, professor and head of surgery at Ahmedabad Civil Hospital, revealed to CNN that Vishwash’s condition was “not very critical”, which is a bit of an odd way of putting it, but regardless, he could well be discharged within the next couple of days.
How about the mental trauma of the incident, though? Surely being the only passenger to live through a plane crash in which your brother also died is going to have a lasting impact on the psyche, maybe a bit of survivor’s guilt, as well as the horrific images he saw before scrambling to safety.
All we can do now is wish Vishwash a speedy recovery and hope the investigation into the crash yields some answers quickly, so that the friends and families of the victims can begin to have some closure as they come to terms with this tragedy.
For all the theories thus far as to what happened to the plane, click HERE.
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