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?
—Mitchell Hegman
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