The Lone Survivor

I’m sure you heard about this story, which made front-page news a few weeks ago.

A Boeing 787 Air India Dreamliner crashed in Ahmedabad, India, killing 241 passengers on board. Miraculously, one passenger — Vishwashkumar Ramesh, a 40-year-old British citizen of Indian origin – escaped relatively unharmed, an extraordinarily rare occurrence.

Ramesh was returning from a visit with family in India.  He was seated in Seat 11A, the exit row window seat of the plane.

Moments after takeoff, the plane crashed into a medical college hostel.  The force of impact damaged or dislodged the emergency exit door; Ramesh saw an opening and unfastened his seatbelt and simply walked out, even though debris was everywhere.

Reliving the experience, Ramesh said, “I can’t believe myself how I came out of it alive … I tried to open my seat belt, and I was able to get out.”

He was taken to Ahmedabad Civil Hospital with multiple injuries, some burns, and disorientation, but he is now completely out of danger.

Some aviation experts believe that he was able to survive because of a combination of factors: positioning (first exit row), body orientation, restraints, angle of impact, structural breakage, plus some good fortune — essentially, sheer luck.

I prefer to point to the hand of God in this miraculous story.

Interestingly, this is not the first time that only one passenger has survived a deadly plane crash.

In 1971, 17-year-old Juliane Koepcke was only one of 92 passengers who survived a deadly crash in the Peruvian rain forest.  Struck by lightning during a thunderstorm, the plane broke apart in midair. Juliane fell about 10,000 feet while strapped to her seat … and somehow managed to survive with injuries. She trekked through the jungle for 11 days before being rescued. Her survival is one of the most famous lone-survivor stories in aviation history.

In 2009, 12-year-old Bahia Bakari was only one of 153 passengers who survived a deadly crash in the Indian Ocean.  The plane crashed during its final approach to Moroni, the capital city of the Comoros Islands. Bahia clung to floating debris for over nine hours in the ocean before being rescued. She had little swimming experience and no life jacket.

In 1987, 4-year-old Cecelia Cichan was the only passenger of 155 people on board to survive a deadly plane crash in Detroit, Michigan. The plane crashed shortly after takeoff due to pilot error related to incorrect flap settings. Cecelia was found in her seat, still belted in, severely injured but alive. Her story became a symbol of resilience.

All three of these survivors are still alive, and it’s interesting to hear what has happened to them since.

After surviving the crash and her incredible 11‑day trek, Koepcke moved to Germany, earned a PhD in mammalogy in 1987, and conducted bat research in Peru. She married entomologist Erich Diller in 1989. Since 2000, she’s been the director of the Panguana research station in the Peruvian Amazon, and she also works as a librarian at the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology in Munich.  She published an autobiography, “When I Fell from the Sky,” and participated in Werner Herzog’s 1998 documentary, “Wings of Hope.”

Bahia Bakari released a memoir in 2010, “Moi Bahia, la Miraculée,” recounting the plane crash and her ordeal in the Indian Ocean. A lucrative author (some sources estimate her net worth at $5 million), she declined a Steven Spielberg adaptation of her story.

Cecelia Cichan is now in her early 40s.  She endured severe injuries and underwent years of therapy for physical and emotional trauma. She’s now involved in charitable work focused on aviation safety, trauma counseling, and community outreach.

These rare but fascinating stories of survival bring up some important theological questions about God’s role in the world – and like most questions on this subject, there are no easy or definitive answers. Nevertheless, it’s certainly interesting to ponder them.

Of course, if you are an atheist who doesn’t believe in God, the answer to why one person survives a plane crash and hundreds of others don’t is not complicated. Atheists would simply see survival as a random action … a matter of physics or luck rather than divine intervention.

Then there are others who would use such an event to question God Himself.  Why would a benevolent God allow the crash to happen at all, killing so many others — including children – and allow just one person to survive?  In this view, highlighting one survivor as evidence of God’s hand may feel unjust to the memory of those who died.

For others, it may strengthen their belief in God.  They might see the lone survivor as part of a divine plan, protected for a special purpose.  To them, such an event feels like a miracle — something that defies odds and points to a higher power.

In fact, survivors themselves have sometimes interpreted their experience in this way. For instance, Juliane Koepcke has spoken about a sense of destiny, though not always in overtly religious terms.

There’s also a middle ground. Some people believe God works through nature, not by suspending natural laws, but by sustaining the world in ways that we don’t fully understand.

Others find divine meaning in the human response: the compassion of rescuers, the resilience of the survivor, or the lessons that can be learned after such a tragedy. In my opinion, this might be the most Jewishly oriented explanation and approach.

Ultimately, how one interprets such an event often says more about one’s preexisting beliefs than about the event itself. A believer might see God’s hand in survival; a skeptic might see it as a statistical anomaly. Neither stance can fully prove or disprove God — but these stories certainly do touch something deep in the human spirit.

I know they do for me.