On Thursday, a Boeing jet crashed just moments after taking off from an airport in Ahmedabad in western India. The Air India airliner, carrying 242 passengers, slammed into a nearby medical college and exploded in an enormous fireball.
Somehow, one man survived: 38-year-old Viswash Kumar Ramesh.
"I don't know how I am alive," Viswash said, according to his younger brother Nayan Ramesh, as quoted by the New York Times.
In a video widely shared on social media, the India-born British citizen can be seen limping away from the crash site and towards an ambulance, his shirt bloodied and with what appears to be ash clinging to his hair and clothes.
It's almost certain that everyone else onboard perished in the disastrous crash, including Viswash's brother Ajay. The siblings were returning to England after a vacation in India.
Ramesh echoed his disbelief in an interview from his hospital bed. "I still can't believe how I got out alive," he told Indian state-owned broadcaster DD News, as quoted by the NYT. "I thought I was also about to die."
Officials are still investigating the cause of the crash of Air India Flight 171, which could take months or even years to determine. One compelling piece of evidence so far is footage of the takeoff from several angles. As the airliner, a Boeing Dreamliner 787, rises from the runway, it can be seen losing lift, before eerily floating down to the streets below.
Data from the flight-tracking service Flightradar, which was shared in a tweet, indicates that the jet reached a maximum altitude of 625 feet — with the airport's altitude at about 200 feet — before plunging at a rate of 475 feet per minute.
Additional data from the aviation analytics firm Cirium cited by the NYT showed that the jet, which was delivered in January 2014, had racked up more than 41,000 flight hours, and had taken off or landed nearly 8,000 times over its career — which is typical for its class and age.
What this all means is unclear. Some experts have speculated that this could be a case of an extremely rare double engine failure, while others have disputed this explanation. It's far too early to know for sure, regardless.
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