Surviving the unsurvivable

The catastrophic crash of an Air India Dreamliner flight in June killed 241 passengers and crew members. However, the tragedy also told a remarkable story of survival—a lone passenger who defied near-impossible odds to walk out of one of the deadliest aviation disasters in recent history with minor injuries.

The survivor, 41-year-old Viswashkumar Ramesh, was in seat 11A next to an emergency exit, and managed to jump out of the aircraft after it crashed into a hospital compound near Ahmedabad airport in western India.

The news stirred a familiar, global obsession: Which seat is the safest in a crash? The question surfaces whenever there is a single survivor, or a handful of survivors, in devastating crashes. A Reuters analysis shows there is no universally “safe seat” or section of an aircraft, at least in extraordinary cases of survival, and who lives often depends on a complex mix of factors.

Rarest survival odds

Exceptional cases of survival are rare but not unheard of. Yet Ramesh stands out as a statistical outlier—the proportion of survivors from this crash was the lowest on record for any commercial flight with both fatalities and survivors.

With only one survivor out of 242 on board, the Air India Dreamliner flight had a survival rate of 0.4%, the lowest among about 1,400 fatal accidents with survivors, according to a Reuters analysis of data compiled by the privately-owned Bureau of Aircraft Accidents Archives (BAAA).

In recent history, Ramesh’s remarkable survival story is only comparable to Bahia Bakari, who survived the crash of Yemenia Airways flight 626 near Comoros in 2009 when she was only 12 years old. She was the sole survivor among 153 people on board, a survival rate of 0.7%.

No safe seat

Bakari, unlike Ramesh, was seated in the rear of the aircraft and managed to cling onto a piece of floating debris for hours until she was rescued.

In fact, survivors in extreme cases were not seated in a specific section but were spread across the aircraft—from pilots in the cockpit to flight attendants in the rear jump seat—Reuters found. In all of aviation history, of 45 crashes on flights carrying at least 50 people where only one to five people survived, Reuters identified seat numbers or approximate seating locations for 20 from official investigation reports. 45 people—pilots, flight attendants and passengers—survived in these 20 accidents.

These accidents spanned six decades, involved aircraft of all sizes and generations, occurred worldwide, and under varied circumstances. All but one happened during or shortly after takeoff, or during approach and landing.

Experts Reuters spoke to concurred there was no “safe seat” on an aircraft and that survival was a result of multiple factors.

Odds-defying escapes

Throughout aviation history, there have been nearly 600 fatal accidents of commercial flights with at least 50 people on board. Of them, only 20 had a sole survivor.

But stories of extreme survival go beyond lone survivors—they include equally striking cases where just a handful of people made it out alive against overwhelming odds.

What stands out is not just the number of survivors, but the proportion. In the 1985 crash of a Boeing 747 jumbo jet in Japan, for example, only four of the 524 people on board survived, a survival rate of just 0.8%, making it one of the deadliest crashes in history.

These cases involve a variety of circumstances and survival odds—from a young girl trekking through dense Amazon forest for 10 days to another clinging to debris at sea, and from those seated in the only part of the fuselage that retained its shape to one who hadn’t fastened his seatbelt and was thrown clear of the disintegrating fuselage on impact.

Studies by Popular Mechanics and Time magazine have shown that passengers towards the back of a plane have historically had better odds of survival.

There is no safe seat in a plane in extreme cases of survival, Cheng-Lung Wu, associate professor at the School of Aviation of the University of New South Wales, Australia, told Reuters. “For less extreme cases, access to exits, type of crashes and sitting location do have some degree of influence on survival,” he said.

Hassan Shahidi, CEO of the Flight Safety Foundation, said more than where someone sits, survivability depends on unique dynamics of each event such as impact angles and speed, fire and smoke, structural breakup and evacuation conditions. “That heterogeneity makes seat-location correlations statistically fragile and often misleading,” he said.

BAAA’s founder Ronan Hubert said aviation safety has significantly increased over the past five decades but there was no specific safe seat on an aircraft. “We have to remain rational and to accept fate,” he said.