Photography And Half-Thoughts By Mitchell Hegman

...because some of it is pretty and some of it is not.

Saturday, June 14, 2025

Seat 11A

 

On most days, sitting in seat 11A on a jetliner doesn’t mean much. It’s a window seat ahead of the port wing, and next to an exit. Two days ago, a British national of Indian origin, named Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, took seat 11A a few minutes before the plane he boarded was scheduled to depart from the city of Ahmedabad, India. All around him, other passengers jostled into place, fought carry-ons into the overhead bins, chatted.

At takeoff, the thrust of the Boeing Dreamliner’s engines pressed him firmly against the seat as the jet streaked down the runway. The plane lifted into the air, climbed. And then something odd happened. Later, Vishwash recounted: “After takeoff, after 5–10 seconds, it seemed like the aircraft was stuck.”

Horror absolute.

The plane rather sank in the air and crashed into buildings in the city below, generating a fury of impossible sounds, infinite and unbinding chaos. Somehow, once all the forward momentum ceased, Vishwash Kumar Ramesh opened his eyes. He was alive, but surrounded by the mangled dead. Beside him, the exit door had cracked open. He untangled himself and squeezed out into the light.

All of the other passengers and crew on the flight, including his brother, who had been sitting in a different row, had perished—241 of them. And somehow Vishwash found himself alive and staggering down a street surrounded by shocked and unfamiliar faces.

By what providence, by what flip of luck, had seat 11A saved him?

Dreamliner Seating
Vishwash Kumar Ramesh

—Mitchell Hegman

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