Former pilot’s theory on how sole survivor of Air India crash escaped unscathed

The sole survivor of the Air India plane tragedy might have made it out of the plane wreckage relatively unscathed because he was seated by an emergency exit, a former Qantas pilot has claimed.

Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, who was in seat 11A, was the sole survivor of Thursday’s Air India crash, which killed at least 290 people, including all the other passengers onboard the plane.

The ill-fated flight was travelling from Ahmedabad in western India to London’s Gatwick Airport, before it crashed just moments after take-off, in one of the worst aviation tragedies in the last decade.

Indian authorities are investigating the cause of the crash.

Ramesh, who is a British national, walked away remarkably unscathed from the doomed flight.

Former Qantas pilot David Oliver appeared on Weekend Sunrise on Saturday, where he was questioned about the crash.

“Sitting above the wing, which contains a lot of fuel. It’s remarkable he was able to walk away unscathed,” Oliver told hosts Chris Reason and Monique Wright.

“How it was that he managed to get out and people around him were unable to only compounds the luck that he had to come away almost uninjured.”

It has been reported Ramesh was in row five, just behind business class, next to an emergency exit.

On Friday, Ramesh told reporters he was able to push open the emergency exit door before the plane exploded.

“He was very, very lucky to be seated there,” Oliver said.

“He was lucky that he just had that fleeting seconds to escape the aircraft before it burst into that fireball.”

Safety tips for passengers

Oliver was questioned on how to increase your chances of survival on a plane.

“The obvious thing is to listen to the safety instructions,” he said. “Always wear your seatbelt and have it reasonably, firmly tightened in-flight.”

“I think you’ve got to wear sensible clothing, bare skin going down an escape slide will give you burns. Maybe not as much as Lycra, so just be sensible about what you’re wearing.

“No high-heeled shoes for the ladies. You don’t want to puncture an escape slide if you’re going out.

“But the important thing, listen to the safety instructions and always wear your seatbelt.”

Air India’s black box could provide answers

Investigators have recovered equipment from this week’s tragic plane crash in Ahmedabad, India, which could shed light on the final moments on the flight deck.

The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner’s cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder, which were recovered from on top of the medical college hostel building where the plane crashed, could put to rest some of the speculation into the investigation that killed 241 people aboard the aircraft, according to aviation industry experts.

The flight data recorder was recovered from the rear end of the plane.

The question will be whether the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigators, India, or another country will ingest the black boxes’ data, according to Peter Goelz, former managing director of the NTSB and a CNN aviation analyst.

“It’s quite dramatic,” Goelz told CNN.

“It looked to me like the plane was trying to land at the end. It was flaring, but we just won’t know until we get the boxes back.”

The Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau of India is in possession of the recorders and other potential pieces of evidence for the investigation.

The data recorders are expected to give some insight into what happened during the flight’s final moments, when pilots were making critical decisions.

Less than a minute after take-off, staff on the plane gave a mayday call to air traffic control, Indian civil aviation authorities said.

The deadly crash has drawn even more global attention to air safety and spurred on public anxieties about flying.

There have already been several aviation tragedies and incidents this year — including January’s midair collision between an Army Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines regional jet — that have prompted calls to increase safety measures.

- with CNN