The sole survivor of the deadly Air India crash that killed 241 passengers onboard was strapped into seat 11A — though aviation experts say it’s not typically considered one of the safest spots on an airplane.
British passenger Vishwash Kumar Ramesh was in an emergency exit window seat just behind business class when the Boeing 787 Dreamliner went down seconds after takeoff and burst into flames in a residential neighborhood in India Thursday afternoon.
Ramesh was then found limping through the streets of Ahmedabad, surrounded by the dead bodies of his fellow travelers and the wreckage of the doomed London-bound passenger plane.
But his miraculous outcome defies studies and expert claims that the dreaded middle seat toward the rear of an aircraft is not just the safest place, but also offers the best odds if the plane goes down.
Federal Aviation Administration data analyzed by Time Magazine in 2015 showed that the back third of a plane has the lowest fatality rate — but survival varies with the nature of the crash and where the aircraft absorbs the brunt of the impact.
“It all depends on the crash dynamics,” Daniel Kwasi Adjekum, a University of North Dakota aviation safety researcher, told Live Science.
“Then it really matters where you are seated to be able to survive structurally.”
Passengers in aisle seats in the middle section of the cabin fared the worst, with a 44% fatality rate, per the Time’s study, which reviewed 35 years of FAA data.
However, a 2008 study from the University of Greenwich found that being within five rows of an emergency exit boosted survival chances with passengers able to evacuate the plane at a quicker rate.
“There’s no one-size-fits-all-answer,” Cheng-Lung Wu, a professor at the University of New South Wales, said, noting that seats close to the plane’s wings have more structural protection, Live Science reported.
Despite Thursday’s fatal devastation, air travel remains one of the safest forms of transportation.
The odds of dying on a commercial flight in the US are about 1 in 13.7 million, according to a 2024 study in the Journal of Air Transport Management.
The National Transportation Safety Board also recorded that 94% of major passenger jet accidents between 2001 and 2017 had a full survival rate.
The cause of Thursday’s deadly crash, which also injured 41 people on the ground, is under investigation.