Rewind: Dreamliner’s sole survivor brings back memories of lone survivors — From Amazon to Ahmedabad

Vishwash Ramesh, the sole survivor of the Dreamliner crash in Ahmedabad, joins the few in aviation history who defied death and lived to tell their tale

By Amit Banerjee

The survival of a British passenger of Indian origin, Vishwash Ķumar Ramesh of the ill-fated Dreamliner AI-171 that crashed soon after taking off from Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport in Ahmedabad on June 12, is indeed a miraculous event. This must rank as one of the deadliest aviation tragedies, which claimed the lives of 241 passengers and 12 crew members on board.

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“I don’t believe how I survived. For sometime I thought I was also going to die,” said the 40-year-old Ramesh. “But when I opened my eyes, I realised I was alive. I tried to unbuckle myself from the seat and escape from where I could. It was in front of my eyes that the air hostess and others (died),” he recalled.

Bhoomi Chauhan, a business administration student, initially rued her late arrival at the Ahmedabad airport for missing the London-bound flight. Moments later, her despair turned into relief when she learnt about her providential escape from the jaws of death.

Like Vishwash Kumar, Annette Herfkens was the sole survivor of a domestic Vietnam Airlines Flight 474, which had crashed on approach to Nha Trang Airport on 14 November 1992, resulting in the death of 6 crew members and 24 other passengers, including her fiancé. The aircraft had descended into a virtual impregnable ridge of the O Kha mountain and it had taken rescuers eight days to locate the wreckage site.

Such was Annette’s mental fortitude and power of endurance that battling multiple injuries, she survived solely on rainwater to sustain herself during this period. Her inspirational memoir Turbulence: A True Story of Survival recounting her ordeal received rave reviews and earned fulsome praise from Deepak Chopra, the celebrated author-cum-new age guru: “Annette puts spiritual insights and teachings into practice in a concise and compelling way.”

Another unbelievable survival saga is that of the then 17-year-old Juliane Koepcke aboard a LANSA flight in Peru, which nosedived deep inside the Amazon forest in 1971. Flung from an altitude of 10,000 ft, she lost consciousness and woke up from a deep slumber the next morning. Given her steely resolve and equipped with basic survival techniques imparted by her father, she endured a seemingly endless and arduous 11-day ordeal through the dense rainforest before she could establish contact with human beings.

At the tender age of 14, Bahia Bakari survived the June 2009 Yemenia Airways crash in the Comoros Islands, which killed all the 152 others on board. Unable to withstand the severe turbulence in the aircraft, she plunged into the ocean. Not a deft swimmer, she kept herself adrift by clinging on to a big piece of plane debris for survival.

On 26 Jan 1972, Vesna Vulovic, a Serbian flight attendant on board Yugoslav Airlines Flight 367 displayed exemplary courage by surviving a fall over 33,000 feet without any parachute, when the aircraft exploded mid-air. For her daredevilry, Vulovic made it into the Guinness World Record.

Yet another miracle story was that of George Lamson Jr, who was on a Galaxy Airlines flight that crashed in Reno, Nevada, in 1985. Lamson Jr then all of 17 years, was the only survivor on board of the charter flight that had 71 passengers and crew.

Lamson wrote on his Facebook post after the AI crash: “These events don’t just make headlines. They leave a lasting echo in the lives of those who’ve lived through something similar.”

These unbelievable real-life brushes with near-death bear ample testimony to the time-tested Bengali adage Rakhay Hari Maare Ke (The Maker’s writ runs large on our lives — those whom God protects, none can touch even with a bargepole).

 

(The author is a freelance journalist based in New Delhi)

 

By Agencies

One down, 10 to go?

In an article in The American Prospect, Maureen Tkacik writes that engineers and quality control specialists had warned that the smooth surface of the lightweight composite fibres used to construct the airframe can conceal deadly structural flaws of Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner.

“Just wait a bit. Most planes aren’t designed to dive nosefirst into the ground like the 737 Max. It generally takes… ten or twelve years for assembly-line sloppiness to culminate in a plane crash,” the article quotes John Barnett, who died by suicide last March. Barnett, a quality manager at the Dreamliner’s final assembly plant in Charleston, South Carolina, was testifying about the “insane practices he witnessed and tried vainly to stop”.

According to the article, two people with deep knowledge of the Charleston 787 plant had raised quality concerns over planes that were delivered to Air India. Cynthia Kitchens, a former quality manager who worked at the Charleston plant between 2009 and 2016, documented her frustrating years at Boeing. “One page of which lists the numbers of the 11 planes delivered between early 2012 and late 2013 whose quality defects most kept her awake at night. Six of them went to Air India… The plane that crashed was delivered in January 2014 from Boeing’s now-defunct assembly line in Everett, Washington, though its mid- and aft- fuselages were produced in Charleston.”

“I raised my hand and said, ‘No one who works in this factory wants to fly these planes, I mean, that’s just the truth,’” Kitchens said as quoted by the report. The Air India Dreamliner that crashed on June 12 took off from the Everett airport en route to Delhi for the first time on January 31, 2014.

The US watchdog Federal Aviation Administration  had earlier stopped deliveries of the Dreamliners due to certain issues, including battery overheating. Air India had problems with Dreamliners due to battery issues back in 2013 that forced then government-owned airline to briefly ground its fleet. The airline had received compensation from Boeing for the issues.

Indian Airlines & 787s

Currently, Air India and IndiGo are the two Indian airlines operating the B787 planes.

Of the 34 B787s in the Air India fleet, 27 B787-8s are legacy aircraft. The first of the legacy B787-8 is slated to go for retrofit in July. The remaining joined the Air India fleet after the merger of Vistara with it last year.

The Air India plane — Boeing 787-8 aircraft — VT-ANB — crash on June 12 was the first time that the best-selling wide-body Dreamliner or Boeing 787 suffered a fatal accident resulting in hull loss. It had flown for more than 41,000 hours, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium.

“The aircraft had 18 business class seats and 238 economy class seats. It had more than 41,000 hours of flying time, and almost 8,000 takeoffs and landings, including some 700 cycles in the past 12 months. This is average for that aircraft build year/period,” Cirium said.

Air India, which is expanding its fleet and overseas network, has an additional 20 B787s on order and a letter of intent for options for an additional 24 aircraft, as per Cirium. Recently, IndiGo started operating a B787 leased from Norwegian carrier Norse Atlantic. IndiGo is to lease a total of six such planes for long-haul operations.

Over 1,100 787s criss-cross skies

Considered an airline’s workhorse for long-haul flights, Boeing’s Dreamliners took to the skies 14 years ago and now, there are 1,148 Boeing 787 variants in service globally, with an average age of 7.5 years, Cirium said.

Boeing describes B787 as the “best selling passenger wide-body of all time”. The Dreamliners come in three models — 787-8, 787-9 and 787-10. The 787-8 has a range of up to 13,530 kilometres.

The plane’s length is 57 metres, height is 17 metres and the wingspan is 60 metres, as per Boeing website. The Dreamliner fleet has carried more than 1 billion passengers in less than 14 years, faster than any other wide-body jet in aviation history, according to the aircraft maker’s website.

“A lighter and robust composite structure enables airlines to reduce fuel use by up to 25 per cent compared to the airplanes it replaces. The 787 has unlocked more than 425 new non-stop routes around the world, many of which were never served previously,” it says.

Aviation probe like archaeological excavation

An aviation accident investigation is akin to an archaeological excavation — methodical and painstaking, writes Natasha Heap, Program Director for the Bachelor of Aviation, University of Southern Queensland, in The Conversation. If the evidence is not collected and preserved for later analysis at the time, it will be irrevocably lost.

It involves much more than just finding the black box. Since the Air India flight crashed into building, it will take some time for the aeroplane wreckage, victims and personal belongings to be sorted from the debris. Witness statements and video of the event too will have to be collected, and their analysis will be further informed by company documentation, training, and regulatory compliance information.