The call came through to Leicester just after breakfast – a shaky FaceTime from a hospital bed half a world away. “The plane crashed,” Vishwash Ramesh told his father, his face streaked with blood and disbelief. “I don’t know where Ajay is. I don’t know how I’m alive.”
This 40-year-old British businessman has become the central figure in an aviation mystery after miraculously surviving the Air India crash that killed everyone else on board. Seated in 11A, Ramesh somehow walked away from the wreckage that claimed his brother and 240 others when the Dreamliner nose-dived into an Ahmedabad medical campus.
Doctors treating Ramesh describe a man physically intact but psychologically shattered. “He has cuts and bruises, but his mind is elsewhere,” said Dr. Shariq, part of the medical team. “One moment he’s asking about his brother, the next he’s reliving those terrible seconds.”
At the family home in England, younger brother Nayan struggles to comprehend the cruel twist of fate. “We’re destroyed,” he told reporters, clutching family photos. “Vishwash survived a crash that should have killed him, but Ajay…” His voice trails off.
Aviation analyst David Soucie calls Ramesh’s survival statistically improbable. “That seat location makes this case extraordinary,” he explains. As investigators pore over the black box data, one question overshadows all others: Why did this one man live when so many died?
