Air India crash survivor consumed by guilt over brother's death
Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, a 40-year-old businessman from Leicester, was returning to London on flight AI171 last week when it crashed into a medical college building shortly after taking off from the Ahmedabad airport in the western state of Gujarat.
His brother, Ajay, was one of the 241 people on board the Boeing 787 Dreamliner plane who died in the disaster. Fifty-two British citizens were among those killed. Ramesh miraculously survived with relatively minor injuries after jumping out of an emergency exit next to his seat 11A.
Speaking for the first time since the crash, Ramesh told The Sun: 'I tried to get two seats together but someone had already got one. Me and Ajay would have been sitting together. But I lost my brother in front of my eyes. So now I am constantly thinking 'Why can't I save my brother?''
Ramesh added: 'It's a miracle I survived. I am okay physically but I feel terrible that I could not save Ajay.' Overcome with emotion after the crash, he told friends: 'I wish I was not alive.'
On Tuesday, Ramesh broke down in tears as he helped tocarry his brother's coffin only hours after he had been discharged from hospital. Recalling the final frantic moments on board the plane, Ramesh said: 'Everything happened in seconds. I realised we were going down.'
The aircraft, Ramesh added, 'wasn't gaining altitude and was just gliding. After that, the plane seemed to speed up, before it suddenly slammed into a building and exploded. Everything was visible in front of my eyes when the crash happened.
'I too thought that I was about to die, but then I opened my eyes and realised that I was still alive.'
Ramesh told the Hindustan Times that when the plane crashed, the section he was sitting in landed on the ground rather than hitting the roof of a building. Locals spotted Ramesh as he staggered out of the grounds of a medical college and they led him to an ambulance before he attempted to go back into the inferno searching for his brother.
While in the hospital, Narendra Modi, the prime minister, visited Ramesh. The process of identifying victims through DNA and dental records is ongoing, with 202 victims identified to date.
Air India said in a statement that it was working to repatriate the deceased to the UK and other parts of the world. Air accident investigators from the United States and the UK have been sent to take part in the crash investigation. The black boxes, the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder, have been recovered.
An inspection of Air India's 787 fleet did not reveal any major issues and India's aviation safety watchdog has asked the airline for the training records of the pilots and the dispatchers.
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