When Air India flight AI171 erupted into flames and plunged into the BJ Medical College hostel in Ahmedabad on a sunny Thursday afternoon, it took with it 241 lives — passengers, crew, and residents on the ground.
And yet, amid the twisted wreckage and thick black smoke, one man emerged — injured, but alive.
Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, 41, a British national seated on 11A, was the sole survivor of what is now the world’s first fatal crash involving a Boeing 787 Dreamliner.
On Friday, he was visited by Prime Minister Narendra Modi — a meeting between a leader and a man who, against all odds, walked away from death.
His survival, like so many others in aviation history, raises questions that technology, logic, and science cannot fully answer.
There is a force — invisible and untamed — that at times seems to intervene in the chaos of human life. Whether called fate, destiny, divine will, or cosmic timing, it appears in those rare stories where survival defies physics and common reason.
These are moments when the laws of the universe appear to bend, and a single breath is spared amid a sea of final ones.
Huang Yu — Saved by the Sea and the Sky
In 1948, the hijacking of Miss Macao, a flying boat connecting Hong Kong and Macau, ended in tragedy — the aircraft nosedived into the South China Sea.
Of the 23 souls on board, only one, Huang Yu, survived. Was it cunning or was it something greater that allowed him to leap from the disintegrating plane and float to life with a single life vest?
Among gold traders and circus performers, Yu—Yu—a hijacker himself was the only one who lived, rescued by a passing fisherman who reached him moments before the sea claimed him too.
Juliane Koepcke — Held by the Hands of the Forest
A teenager on Christmas Eve in 1971, Juliane Koepcke, plummeted from the sky strapped to a row of seats as her aircraft shattered midair over the Amazon rainforest.
Her mother perished beside her. Somehow, from 21,000 feet up, she landed in the canopy — unconscious, broken, and alive. For 11 days, she wandered through the jungle, guided perhaps by instinct — or perhaps something far more powerful.
Every step she took through mud, heat, and silence seemed guarded, her life preserved by nature itself until rescue finally came.
Vesna Vulović — The Woman Who Fell From the Sky
What force catches you when you fall 33,000 feet without a parachute? In 1972, flight attendant Vesna Vulović survived just such a fall after a bomb destroyed her Yugoslav Airlines flight.
Her survival wasn’t even supposed to happen — she wasn’t meant to be on that flight, mistaken for another attendant with the same name. When she landed in a snow-covered village, it was a local villager who heard her moans and pulled her from the debris.
With a crushed body and fractured spine, she recovered, defying every rule of medicine. Her story became legend — a whisper of grace in the wind.
Larisa Savitskaya — Eight Minutes and a Miracle
In 1981, Larisa, just 20 and newlywed, found herself dangling from a fragment of a plane that had collided midair with a military bomber.
For eight minutes, she fell — a terrifying eternity. And yet she landed on a soft, swampy glade deep in the Russian wilderness. How does one survive such a fall? She spent three days in the cold, using pieces of the aircraft for warmth.
Decades later, she would reveal her story, having lived in silence under Soviet secrecy. As she would later admit, she had seen the movie Miracles Still Happen just a year before. Perhaps that was no coincidence.
Bahia Bakari — The Girl Who Floated Through Darkness
Twelve-year-old Bahia Bakari had never learned to swim. Yet when her plane crashed into the Indian Ocean in 2009, she clung to a piece of debris in the dark waters for nine hours.
With no life vest, amid crashing waves, she stayed afloat — alone. Come dawn, a passing ship spotted her just as she let go, too exhausted to continue.
A sailor leapt into the sea, pulled her from the water, and brought her back to the world. She was called the miracle girl, and rightfully so — her tale was one of light in absolute darkness.
Annette Herfkens — Alone in the Mountain Mist
In 1992, Annette Herfkens boarded Vietnam Airlines Flight 474 with her fiancé.
When the plane crashed into a jungle ridge during a storm, all others perished. She spent eight days injured, lying in the misty jungle with the corpse of her beloved nearby.
Rainwater collected in insulation foam kept her alive. She rationed it carefully — not by reason, but by a deeper voice that told her to endure. She wasn’t found by search effort, but by something greater, something that led her back to life just as her obituary was being printed.
These aren’t just stories of survival. They are quiet testimonies to something far more mysterious — the presence of an unseen universal command that occasionally, inexplicably, says: Not this one. Not now.
Modern aircraft are engineered to the highest standards. Black boxes are designed to record every whisper in the cockpit and every tremor in the system.
But no data can yet quantify the miracle of one person walking out when all others perish. When Vishwash Kumar Ramesh walked out from the wreckage of AI171 — battered but breathing — he joined a lineage of lives that were mysteriously spared.
Each of these stories reminds us that, for all our belief in human control, we remain fragile creatures beneath an infinite sky. And every once in a while, a silent hand, beyond radar and reason, reaches down — and lifts just one soul back to life.
