The only survivor of the Air India plane crash says he couldn’t believe he made it out alive after escaping from a broken emergency exit in a deadly crash that killed 241 people.
Shortly after Thursday’s crash, social media footage showed Viswashkumar Ramesh limping down the street in a blood-stained t-shirt and with bruises on his body.
The British national was sitting in seat 11A on the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner that was flying in to London when the plane crashed into a medical college hostel moments after taking off from India’s northwestern city of Ahmedabad.
Ramesh, 40, told India’s national broadcaster DD News from his hospital bed on Friday that he thought he was “also going to die”.
“But when I opened my eyes, I realised I was alive and I tried to unbuckle myself from the seat and escape from where I could. It was in front of my eyes that the air hostess and others [died],” he said.
He was travelling with his brother Ajay, who had been seated in a different row, members of his family said.
“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,” Ramesh said.
“The opposite side of the aircraft was blocked by the building wall so nobody could have come out of there,” he added.
He explained that the plane had seemed to have come to a standstill midair for a few seconds shortly after taking off and felt the engine thrust, which later “crashed with speed into the hostel”.
Ramesh’s cousin Hiren Kantilal, 19, told the AFP news agency that he called his family in Leicester, in the East Midlands in England, after the crash to tell them he was alive.
“Our plane has been crashed,” Ramesh told his dad, according to his cousin.
“He was bleeding all over him, in the face and everything, and he said, ‘I am just waiting for my brother and I don’t know how I get out of the plane.’
“He said: ‘Do not worry about me, try to find about Ajay Kumar’ and he said: ‘I am totally fine.’”
Kantilal said his cousin had spent about 10 to 15 minutes seeking his brother, and then was whisked away to hospital by the rescue services.
“We are happy Vishwash has been saved, but on the other hand, we are just heartbroken about Ajay,” he told AFP.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the crash site on Friday and met Ramesh at the hospital.
Rescue workers continued to search for missing people and aircraft parts on Friday following the worst aviation crash in a decade.
The post ‘I realised I was alive’: Sole survivor of Air India crash recounts tragedy appeared first on Al Jazeera.
