Mumbai accountant Arjun Mehta was left reeling when he discovered, while reading a detailed Reuters interview with the sole survivor, that Vishwash Kumar Ramesh had sat in 11A—the very exit-row seat Mehta himself occupied during a frightening 2015 engine failure incident.
That earlier flight, a Boeing 737, lost an engine cowling over the Bay of Bengal and made an emergency landing in Chennai. Mehta still remembers how his seatbelt locked and the cabin lurched, an experience he recounted in a firsthand Guardian account of in-flight chaos.
@FlightSurvivors “Exit-row seats 11A and 11B have now saved two lives in separate Air India incidents—an unbelievable coincidence.” via X
In the more recent tragedy, Air India Flight AI171 crashed near Ahmedabad, tearing open the fuselage and billowing flames into cabin 11A. Ramesh’s split-second choice to unbuckle and crawl through a reinforced wing-box tunnel is chronicled in an Aviation Week case study of a miraculous escape.
Mehta, who learned of this in a BBC News profile of the crash survivor, described the revelation as “cosmic déjà vu.” He now promotes exit-row safety on his YouTube channel, where his cabin safety tutorials have garnered hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
@Seat11A_Survivor “Knowing how to operate the emergency exit is as crucial as wearing your seatbelt.” View on X
Aviation engineer Dr. Lena Duarte explains in an NPR safety briefing on exit-row design that seats like 11A feature reinforced bulkheads and direct egress paths, sharply improving survival rates in catastrophic failures.
The Directorate General of Civil Aviation confirmed in a preliminary bulletin that engine thrust anomalies triggered the disaster. Meanwhile, the U.S. NTSB has joined the probe, aiming to publish a full report by year’s end.
@AeroDesignNews “Manufacturers must reinforce exit-row framing and widen door openings—this coincidence highlights design flaws.” via X
Both Mehta and Ramesh plan to meet after the investigation concludes and hope their dual survival in seat 11A sparks global airlines to enhance preflight exit-row briefings—a reform urged in a Economist editorial on aviation safety.
For now, Mehta remains humbled by the twist of fate. “Seat 11A was my safety net once,” he says. “To learn it saved another man’s life too—it’s a responsibility I won’t take lightly.”
