The lone survivor of the Air India crash that killed the other 241 people aboard said in a new interview that he thought he was going to die.
“Everything happened before my eyes. I still can’t believe myself how I came out alive. For a little while I thought I was going to die, but when I opened my eyes, I realized I was alive. So, I tried to escape,” Vishwash Kumar Ramesh told NDTV in a new interview from his hospital bed.
The 40-year-old British national explained that about five to 10 seconds after takeoff on Thursday, it felt like the plane—a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner headed from Ahmedabad, India, to London’s Gatwick Airport—was “stuck.”
A green and white light came on, and the plane flew straight into a building, which turned out to be a hostel for a medical college where the students were having lunch. Five people on the ground were killed in the crash.
“There was a wall on the opposite side, but near me, it was open. I ran. I don’t know how. I don’t know how I came out of it alive. For a while, I thought I was about to die. But when I opened my eyes, I saw I was alive, and I opened my seat belt and got out of there. The air hostess… died before my eyes.”,” said Ramesh, who was seated in number 11A next to the emergency exit.
“The door must’ve broken on impact,” he continued. “There was a wall on the opposite side, but near me, it was open. I ran. I don’t know how. I don’t know how I came out of it alive.”
On the other side of the plane, the building’s wall blocked people trying to get out, he said.
“It was really only on my side where there was space to get out,” he said. “But still I don’t know how I survived. Because I could see in front of my eyes the air hostesses and others—just everybody caught in it.”
As he fled on foot, the plane was on fire.
“When the fire erupted, I burnt my left hand. The ambulance brought me to the hospital,” he said.
As of Friday, it wasn’t clear yet what had caused the crash. The flight’s black box had been recovered, and investigators from the U.S. and the U.K. had arrived in India to help determine what went wrong.
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