Sole Air India Crash Survivor Calls His Survival a Miracle.

12 hours ago7 min read

The mangled fuselage of Air India Express Flight 1345 lay scattered across the tabletop-flat tarmac of Kozhikode's Karipur airport, a grotesque sculpture of twisted metal and shattered dreams under the relentless Kerala monsoon rain. In the chaotic, rain-lashed darkness of that August evening, as rescue workers scrambled through the wreckage and the cries of the injured pierced the air, a single, improbable story of survival began to emerge—that of Viswashkumar Ramesh.For the 184 others on board, the Boeing 737’s catastrophic overshoot and subsequent breakup upon landing marked a brutal, final end; for Ramesh, it was the beginning of an anguish so profound that his survival feels less like a victory and more like a burden of cosmic proportions. He describes the moments not with the language of heroism or relief, but with the raw, unfiltered vocabulary of trauma: the deafening screech of tearing aluminum, the violent, disorienting tumble down the ravine, the sudden, crushing silence broken only by the hiss of escaping fuel and the monsoon's drumbeat on the shattered cabin roof.His physical injuries, while severe, are almost a footnote in the narrative he now carries—a narrative dominated by the psychological specters of survivor’s guilt and the haunting, unanswerable question of ‘why me?’. This tragedy forces a grim re-examination of the ‘tabletop’ runway design at Kozhikode, a topic of heated debate among aviation safety experts for years.These runways, perched on plateaus with steep drop-offs at either end, offer zero margin for error, a fact tragically underscored not only here but in the 2010 Mangalore Air India Express crash that claimed 158 lives. The investigation will undoubtedly dissect the pilot’s decision to land in challenging weather, the aircraft’s approach speed, and the runway’s safety parameters, but such technical post-mortems provide cold comfort. They cannot quantify the unique, isolating pain of the sole survivor, a man now tethered to 184 ghosts, for whom the miracle of his continued breath is inextricably woven with the agony of memory, a living testament to a disaster that rewrote his life in an instant and left a nation grappling with a familiar, and preventable, grief.

#Air India

#plane crash

#sole survivor

#miracle

#recovery

#aviation safety

#featured

Stay Informed. Act Smarter.

Get weekly highlights, major headlines, and expert insights — then put your knowledge to work in our live prediction markets.