The “double miracle” of seat 11A is incredible, but they’re not the only cases of air crash survivors who defied logic

The case of Vishwash Kumar Ramesh seems impossible. He was the sole survivor of Air India flight AI171, in which the other 241 passengers and crew members died, along with 37 people who were in the building or nearby areas at the time of the crash on June 12. The plane hit the ground and immediately burst into flames, but the video showing Vishwash emerging from the smoke and fire on his own has gone viral and simply seems like a miracle. “I still can’t believe I’m alive.”

The fact that he was sitting in seat 11A has also gone viral—the same seat occupied by Ruangsak James Loychusak on December 11, 1988, when he was the sole survivor of Thai Airways flight 261, which crashed in Thailand. The coincidence has sparked countless speculations about the technical reasons that might make seat 11A a kind of talisman in the event of a crash. Interestingly, in some aircraft models like the Boeing 737, it’s a windowless seat that travelers often avoid, but it’s possible that more superstitious passengers may start to see it as a lucky seat, even though most experts consider it nothing more than a statistical coincidence.

Throughout history, there have only been 34 cases of commercial flights with a single survivor. And if the 11A seat coincidence seems surprising, there are even more incredible stories.

A fall from 33,300 feet

Perhaps the most astonishing story is that of Vesna Vulović, who on January 26, 1972, defied all the laws of physics. JAT Yugoslav Airlines flight 367, carrying 23 passengers and 5 crew members, was the target of a terrorist attack. A bomb hidden in a suitcase exploded in the luggage compartment at an altitude of 33,300 feet over Czechoslovakia, causing the plane to break apart in mid-air. After the explosion, Vesna, who was likely standing while attending to passengers, was thrown toward the rear of the aircraft and became trapped by a food cart.

The tail section crashed into a heavily wooded and snow-covered area, which helped cushion the impact. She was found pinned among the wreckage, beneath the body of another flight attendant, with a fractured skull, broken pelvis, legs, and three crushed vertebrae that caused temporary paralysis from the waist down. After 27 days in a coma and many months of surgeries and rehabilitation, she survived. Her physical aftereffects were limited to a slight limp, although she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder for the rest of her life: “Every time I think about the crash, I feel guilty and cry... I think maybe I shouldn’t have survived.” She is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the person who survived the highest fall without a parachute: 33,300 feet.

Surviving in the jungle

Just as incredible is the story of Juliane Koepcke. She was 17 years old when she was flying from Lima to Pucallpa with her mother on LANSA flight 508 on December 24, 1971. The aircraft, a Lockheed L-188 Electra, was carrying 92 people. While flying over the Amazon rainforest, it entered a thunderstorm. A lightning strike hit the plane, which nearly disintegrated at an altitude of about 9,800 feet. Juliane, thrown from the aircraft still strapped to her seat, plummeted into the jungle, but the dense vegetation cushioned the impact.

When she woke up, she had a broken collarbone along with many bruises and cuts. Her parents were biologists and had taught her survival techniques. That knowledge was key to her staying alive for 11 days in a hostile environment while searching for civilization. One of the wounds on her arm became infected and filled with maggots, but she managed to treat it using gasoline. By following the course of several streams, she eventually reached a logging camp. “The jungle saved my life; it was never something that threatened me,” she said. Years later, Juliane studied biology in Germany and returned to Peru as a zoologist specializing in bats.

She’s not the only one who survived in the jungle. On November 14, 1992, Annette Herfkens, a 31-year-old Dutch woman, was the sole survivor among the 30 people aboard a Yakovlev Yak-40 that crashed in the Vietnamese jungle. Trapped in the wreckage, surrounded by bodies and severely injured to the point she couldn’t move, she survived for eight days by drinking rainwater collected with a scarf until she was rescued. “I focused on the beauty of the jungle, and that saved my life.”

The miracle children

There are several cases in which the survivors were children. The youngest, Mohamed al-Fateh, was just 2 years old when he was found crying in the bushes with severe burns in the area of Sudan where a Boeing 737 crashed on July 8, 2003, during a flight from Port Sudan to Khartoum. The other 115 people on board died.

But the most extraordinary case of a child’s survival was that of Bahia Bakari. At 12 years old, she was on Yemenia Airways flight 626, traveling from Yemen to the Comoros Islands on June 30, 2009. During the approach, the plane crashed into the sea. “I felt an electric shock and woke up in the water.” Bahia had multiple fractures, severe burns, didn’t know how to swim, and wasn’t wearing a life vest, but she clung to a piece of wreckage and held on alone in the ocean for nine hours while other survivors gradually disappeared beneath the waves. She was the only person rescued alive out of the 153 people on board.

All of these are astonishing survival stories, but only two of the 34 known cases of commercial flights with a sole survivor involved someone seated in the now-famous seat 11A.

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