Why me? Sole survivors of air crashes tell their stories

After Vishwash Kumar Ramesh survived the Air India aircraft crash, Alex Ross looks at other people who had lucky escapes

- ALEX ROSS

The sole survivor of the Air India plane crash that killed more than 240 people somehow walked from the wreckage of the aircraft after it crashed in the city of Ahmedabad.

Vishwash Kumar Ramesh was in seat 11A near the emergency exit, and managed to escape through the broken hatch. He was filmed after Thursday’s disaster limping along the street in a bloodstained T-shirt with bruises on his face.

The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner plummeted seconds after take-off and erupted in a ball of fire, killing everyone else on board.

As extraordinary as it seems, the 40-year-old Briton’s miraculous escape isn’t the first story of a sole air-crash survivor. Dozens of stories have been shared from as far back as 1929, when 34-year-old Lou Foote survived a crash that killed 14 others in Newark, New Jersey.

But despite their good fortune in narrowly avoiding death, those who experience such lucky escapes often find the aftermath difficult to deal with. More recent survivors, while celebrated in the media, have spoken of lifelong feelings of guilt and sorrow following the incidents that almost killed them.

Here we take a look at six survivor stories.

“Whenever I think of the accident, I have a prevailing, grave feeling of guilt for surviving it and I cry.” Serbian flight attendant Vesna Vulovic, the sole survivor of the fateful Yugoslav Airlines flight from Copenhagen to Zagreb, was haunted by these feelings for the rest of her life.

Vulovic’s broken body was found among the wreckage after the aircraft fell into woods near Srbska Kamenice in the former Czechoslovakia, killing 23 passengers and four crew.

Vulovic, who fell 33,300ft without a parachute, was paralysed from the waist down, but after two operations she learned to walk again, just a year after the crash.