THE LONE SURVIVOR OF FLIGHT 171: How Did This Man Walk Away From A Crash That Killed All 264 Other Passengers?
One man walked away from the twisted wreckage of Air India Flight 171 while 265 others perished in flames, and nobody can explain how he survived what should have been impossible.
The Boeing 787-8 lifted off from Ahmedabad airport in western India on a Thursday afternoon, carrying 242 souls toward London. Within thirty seconds, something went horribly wrong.
Vishwash Kumar Ramesh sat in seat 11A, a window seat in the first row of economy class. The 40-year-old British man watched the ground fall away below him as the massive aircraft climbed into the sky. Then came the sound that would haunt him forever — a loud noise that cut through the engine’s roar like a scream.
The plane began to sink.
Air traffic controllers received a Mayday call — the international distress signal that means death is approaching fast. The aircraft descended through the air in what looked almost like a controlled landing, but there was no runway waiting below. Instead, the jet smashed into a building on the outskirts of the airport.
The front of the plane drove deep into the structure like a spear. Only the tail remained visible, sticking out like a monument to disaster. Flames erupted from the wreckage, sending towers of black smoke into the sky that could be seen for miles.
Inside the twisted metal and burning debris, 265 people died. Passengers from India, Britain, Portugal, and Canada. Eleven children who would never see home again. Twelve crew members who had guided their last flight. Many others on the ground perished when the jet destroyed the hostel where local doctors lived.
But in the middle of all that death, one man stood up.
Ramesh opened his eyes to a scene from a nightmare. Bodies surrounded him in the wreckage. Pieces of the aircraft lay scattered like broken toys. The smell of fuel and smoke filled the air. Terror gripped him as he realized he was alive in a place where no one should have survived.
“I was scared,” he would later tell reporters from his hospital bed. “I stood up and ran.”
Someone pulled him from the debris and put him in an ambulance. Local news cameras captured footage of a man in a stained white T-shirt walking away from the crash site with a slight limp. His face was bloodied on the left side — the side that had been pressed against the window when the plane went down.
At first, officials declared there were no survivors. The crash was too violent, the fire too intense. But Ramesh proved them wrong by simply existing.
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He showed his folded boarding pass to local media. The name matched. The flight number matched. Seat 11A matched the passenger manifest. Vishwash Kumar Ramesh had been on Air India Flight 171, and somehow he had walked away while everyone else died.
The seat he occupied was not considered desirable by most travelers. It sat beside an emergency exit, behind the kitchen galley that separated business class from economy. The location came with problems — noise from the kitchen, no floor space for bags, and a narrow seat with an immovable armrest. But it also provided extra legroom because it was in an exit row.
Police Commissioner G.S. Malik confirmed the impossible: “The police found one survivor in seat 11A. He has been in the hospital and is under treatment.”
Doctors treated Ramesh for impact injuries to his chest, face, and feet. His wounds were serious enough to require hospitalization but not severe enough for intensive care. He lay in a general ward bed, conscious and able to speak, while 265 families began planning funerals.
The man who cheated death had been returning to his home in Leicester, England, after visiting family in India. He lived there with his wife and child, building a life far from the country where he was born. But this trip had been special — he had traveled with his older brother, Ajay Kumar Ramesh.
Ajay had been sitting in a different row on the plane.
When Ramesh called his family in England to tell them he had survived, he had terrible news to share. His brother was not among the living. Ajay remained missing in the wreckage, another number added to the growing death toll.
“He said, ‘I have no idea how I exited the plane,'” his brother Nayan Kumar Ramesh told reporters after speaking with the survivor.
The flight had been scheduled to depart at 1:10 in the afternoon but left the gate 29 minutes late. The delay meant nothing to most passengers — just another inconvenience in air travel. But for 241 people, those extra minutes were the last delay they would ever experience.
Less than a minute after takeoff, the aircraft began its final descent. The Mayday call reached the control tower as the plane fell from the sky like a wounded bird. Videos captured the Boeing 787-8 dropping through the air in what appeared to be a controlled descent, but control was an illusion. The aircraft was dying, and it was taking almost everyone with it.
The building that stopped the plane’s fall housed doctors and medical staff. The cruel irony was not lost on investigators — healers killed by the very machine that was supposed to bring people safely home.
Emergency crews fought the fires and pulled bodies from the wreckage throughout the night. They searched through twisted metal and melted plastic, looking for any sign of life. They found only death, except for one man who should not have survived.
Ramesh lay in his hospital bed, his face marked by injuries that would heal. Around him, the city of Ahmedabad mourned its dead while investigators began the long process of determining what had gone wrong. The black boxes would be analyzed. The wreckage would be examined piece by piece. Experts would create theories and run tests.
But none of that would answer the question that haunted everyone who heard the story: How did one man walk away from a crash that killed 265 other people?
The investigation continues. The cause of the crash remains unknown. Families grieve for their lost loved ones while Ramesh recovers from injuries that, by all logic, should have been fatal.
In seat 11A, beside an emergency exit, a man experienced a miracle that no one can explain. While death claimed everyone else on Air India Flight 171, Vishwash Kumar Ramesh opened his eyes in hell and somehow found his way out.
COVER PHOTO: The back of Air India flight 171 is pictured at the site after it crashed in a residential area near the airport in Ahmedabad on June 12, 2025. | PHOTO BY SAM PANTHAKY /AFP via Getty Images
STORY SOURCE: National Post
NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is not an AI voice. (AI Policy)
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