Travel agents in India are noticing a spike in interest for seat 11A after Vishwash Kumar Ramesh was the only person to survive an Air India plane crash last week. Anil Punjabi of the Travel Agents Federation of India confirmed the surge in demand to The Times of India.
On June 12, a London-bound plane crashed shortly after taking off in Ahmedabad, India. The incident killed 241 passengers and crew, but one man on board survived. Ramesh, 40, who sat in the emergency exit row, walked away from the wreckage with only relatively minor injuries. However, his brother, who sat next to him, died in the crash.
Now, other travelers are requesting to sit in the very same seat to mirror Ramesh’s luck.
But Thai singer and actor James Ruangsak Loychusak, who was one of the survivors of a deadly 1998 Thai Airways plane crash, is calling it an “uncanny coincidence.”
“Survivor of a plane crash in India. He sat in the same seat as me. 11A,” Loychusak wrote on Facebook Friday.
According to the Aviation Safety Network, the Airbus A310 Loychusak was aboard in 1998 and crashed during its approach to Surat Thani Airport, killing 101 people. In a further explanation, Loychusak wrote in Thai that he doesn’t have his ticket or boarding pass from the flight. But he claimed to know his seat number based on online seating charts for his aircraft, which he shared online.
“That was an uncanny coincidence,” he told India’s The Telegraph Online Monday. “The kind that gives you goosebumps.”
Is seat 11A on a plane safer?
After Loychusak shared his post, the story began to go viral, and some people commenting online have wondered if there’s something about seat 11A that makes it safer than others.
Not according to aviation and disaster medicine experts, who tend to agree that all crashes are unique, and there are a number of random factors that could improve your chances of survival, so it’s more about all those variables aligning.
“Each accident is different, and it is impossible to predict survivability based on seat location,” said Mitchell Fox, a director at Flight Safety Foundation, a U.S.-based nonprofit, told Reuters.
Sitting next to an exit door might help you survive an accident, but it won’t always be 11A because aircraft can have dozens of different configurations.
“In this particular instance, because the passenger was sitting adjacent to the emergency exit, this was obviously the safest seat on the day,” said Ron Bartsch, Chairman at Sydney-based AvLaw Aviation Consulting, told Reuters. “But it’s not always 11A, it’s just 11A on this configuration of the Boeing 787.”
A 2007 Popular Mechanics study of crashes since 1971 found that passengers towards the back of the plane had better survival odds. Some experts suggest the wing section offers more stability.
Sitting next to an exit door, like Ramesh, allows you to be one of the first out of the plane, although some exits don’t function after a crash. The opposite side of the plane was blocked by the wall of a building it crashed into, he said.