On Friday Prime Minister Narendra Modi met the passenger on seat 11A, the sole survivor of the Air India Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner that crashed in Ahmedabad shortly after take-off on Thursday afternoon, killing all the other passengers and crew on board, as well as some on the ground.
The 41-year old Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, a British national, joins the list of miraculous air crash survivors around the world.
1. Huang Yu, Chinese:
Miss Macao, a PBY Catalina flying boat operating the 20-minute journey from then British colony of Hong Kong and Portuguese colony of Macao, was hijacked on July 16, 1948.
Among the 23 passengers on board, 12 were Chinese, while the seven others were Americans, British, Russians and Portuguese, apart from the four-member crew.
The passengers included a millionaire gold bullion trader, a famous horse-jockey, an executive of the Coca Cola company and a ringmaster of a famous circus company.
The flight did not reach Hong Kong in the stipulated time that set the alarm bells ringing.
While the officials awaited information at Hong Kong, a fisherman spotted Miss Macao flying northwards before a sudden change in direction and then dive nose-first into the South China Sea. The fisherman arrived at the crash site and rescued the sole survivor Huang Yu, one of the four Chinese passengers who had hijacked Miss Macao. Yu had managed to grab a life jacket and jumped out as soon the aircraft impacted the sea surface.
A prolonged investigation and despite a confession from Yu, he was released three years later as the governments of Portugal and British administered Hong Kong failed to reach common ground over jurisdiction.
2. Juliane Koepcke, German-Peruvian
Juliane Koepcke, German-Peruvian - Wikipedia
On the Christmas eve of 1971, Juliane Koepcke, a 17-year old senior high school student boarded a LANSA Flight 508 along with her mother Maria, a well-known mammologist, and 90 other people both passengers and crew.
The German filmmaker Werner Herzog was also supposed to board the flight to scout for the locations of his upcoming film Aguirre, the Wrath of God, but had a change of plans. Herzog went on to a make a documentary on Juliane, Wings of Hope.
The mother-daughter duo was on the way to Panguana, where Maria and her husband Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke had set up a research centre. They boarded the flight from Lima’s Jorge Chavez International Airport and were headed to Iquito.
About an hour since take off, at 21,000 feet above the sea level, lightning struck the aircraft setting the left wing on fire. “That is the end. It’s all over,” whispered Maria to her teenage daughter, as the two sat holding hands. Those were her mother’s last words.
As the aircraft disintegrated it fell straight into the Peruvian Amazon rainforest. Strapped to her seat bench, Juliane fell out of the plane and went head over heels towards the forest below her. Before she hit the ground, Juliane lost consciousness.
With a broken collarbone, a deep cut on her right arm, a concussion and an injured eye, Juliane survived in the forest for 11 days until she was rescued.
A short-sighted Juliane had lost her glasses and used one of the remaining white sandals before taking every step. Juliane took refuge in a creek close to the crash site. She could hear rescue aircrafts hovering above the forest but neither could see the other. By the 10th day a thoroughly exhausted and hallucinating Juliane drifted along the edge of a large river, till she came across a hut. By then maggots had infected the injured arm. Next day the hut’s inhabitants arrived and took her to a hospital, where she was reunited with her father. Maria’s body was found on January 12.
Juliane recounted her survival story in her 2011 autobiography Als ich vom Himmel Fiel: Wi emir der Dschungel mein Leben zuruckrab/ When I fell from the Sky: How the Jungle Gave Me My Life Back.
Italian filmmaker Giuseppe Maria Scotese made in 1974 the film Miracles Do Happen on Julian’s miraculous survival in the Amazon.
Following her father’s death, Juliane took over as the director of the Panguana. Later she moved to Munich where she worked as a librarian at the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology.
3. Vesna Vulovic, Serbia
Vesna Vulovic, Serbia - Wikipedia
The JAT Yugoslav Airlines’ Flight 367 was brought down after a bomb explosion ripped through the baggage compartment on January 26, 1972.
The debris came crashing on then Czechoslovakian mountains near Sbrska Kamenice. Along with the debris was Vesna Vulovic, a 22-year old flight attendant.
Among the 28 persons on board, Vesna was the only person to emerge alive having survived a 33,000 feet freefall without any parachute. Her cries were heard by a villager Bruno Honke who kept her alive till the rescuers arrived.
At the hospital Vesna was found to have a fractured skull, two crushed vertebrae, broken pelvis, several ribs and both her legs. She was temporarily paralysed from waist down. Till about a month Vesna had no recollection of the explosion and the ordeal that she had been through.
Vesna and the other members of the JAT Flight 367, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9 aircraft, had boarded the flight from Copenhagen on its arrival from Stockholm. It was flying to Belgrade.
She was not scheduled to fly the Flight 367 on the fateful night, but the airlines had reportedly confused her with another flight attendant also named Vesna.
In 1985 the Guinness Book of World Records recognised Vesna as the world record holder for surviving the highest fall without a parachute.
Following her recovery Vesna returned to the airlines industry, this time as a desk attendant. By the late 1990s and early 2000s she was among the prominent anti-government voices in the country.
The former Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito honoured Vesna as national hero. Serbian folk singer Miroslav Ilic composed a song Vesna the stewardess.
On December 23 2016 Vesna was found dead in her Belgrade apartment and was buried at Belgrade’s New Cemetery four days later.
4. Larisa Savitskaya, Russia
The 20-year old Russian was returning from her honeymoon on board Aeroflot Flight 811, a scheduled then Soviet domestic passenger flight between Komsomolsk-on-Amur and Blagoveshchensk on August 24, 1981.
At 17,130 feet mid-air Larisa’s flight collided with a Tupolev Tu-16K strategic bomber ober Zavitinsky district in Russia’s Amur Oblast.
Except for Larisa, 37 other persons on board including her husband Vladimir perished in the collision.
Larisa was conscious during the eight minute fall hanging on to a 13 by 10 feet fragment of the aircraft, which landed her on a soft, swampy glade. It was after the impact that Larisa lost consciousness for a while. The landing had left her with a concussion, a broken arm, rib and teeth and some injuries to the spine.
For three days Larisa survived in the wilderness, covered in snow with blankets from the flight’s wreckage to keep fight the cold till the rescuers found her wandering in the forest on the third day.
The mid-air collision was deemed classified by the Soviet government and the incident came to light only after the fall of the Soviet Union 10 years later. Larisa would speak about the air accident openly only in 2001, nearly two decades later.
Incidentally, a year before her marriage and the air-collision she had seen the film Miracles Still Happen, based on the life of Juliane Koepcke, a survivor like Larisa.
The 2021 documentary Eight Minutes to the Ground traced the story of the crash, survival and secrecy. A year later came the Russian feature film, One which was also based on the same incident.
5. Bahia Bakari, France
Bahia-Bakari,-France (X/@tuCpakoa)
Twelve-year old Bahia and her mother Aziza Aboudou were traveling to Comoros for summer vacation when their aircraft plunged into the Indian Ocean on June 30, 2009.
There were 152 persons on board the Yemenia Flight 626, an Airbus A310 when it crashed into the Indian Ocean near the north coast of Grande Comore.
Without a life vest and little swimming experience, the 12-year old clung to a piece of aircraft wreckage in the heavy seas for nine hours, most of them in darkness.
The next morning, the Sima Com 2 – private ship which ferries passengers between Comoros and Madagascar reached the crash site and found the exhausted little girl.
When she saw the rescue vessel approaching, Bahia let go of the wreckage and was lost in the water for a few minutes. One of the sailors on the Sim Com 2, Maturaffi Sélémane Libounah jumped into the waters and handed a floatation device to the girl before both were pulled aboard.
The French government arranged a Falcon-900 government jet for the girl to return home to her father, escorted by a French minister.
In Paris she was treated for a fractured pelvis and collarbone, knee burns and facial injuries. Bahia was described as “the miracle girl.”
6. Annette Herfkins, Dutch
Annette-Herfkins,Dutch (X/@fasc1nate)
The Vietnam Airlines Flight 474 crashed during the Cyclone Forrest on November 14, 1992 while approaching the NhaTang Airport.
Annette Herfkens, a banker based in Madrid, had boarded the flight from Ho Chi Minh city along with her fiancé Willem and 23 other passengers and six crew members.
Barely six minutes before landing the aircraft lost altitude and crashed along the O Kha mountain ridge and fell in a Vietnam jungle.
Annette had 12 broken bones in her hip and knee, a hanging jaw and a collapsed lung. Around her voices of the other injured passengers in the dense forest fell silent one after the other. Annette had crawled out of the wreckage, lifted herself down and crawled another 30 yards away from the debris before collapsing.
For eight days she remained in the forest hoping to be rescued. In all those days Willem’s decomposing body was by her side.
She used the insulation materials in the aircraft’s broken wing as sponge to collect rain water and quench her thirst. She would take a gulp every two hours, conserving her energy and preserving the meagre quantity in the eight balls that she had made from the insulation material.
Even her obituary had made it to the dailies, when she was finally rescued.
Twenty two years since the accident, Annette wrote her memoir, Turbulence: A True Story of Survival.
Before the pandemic five years ago she was in talks for a film based on her memoir. Herfkens now works as an inspirational speaker.
