As it emerged on Thursday that a British man had defied the odds to be the only survivor after an Air India flight to Gatwick Airport crashed just seconds after takeoff, commentators praised the 'miracle of seat 11A.'
Sat on the far left of the Boeing 787 flight that departed Ahmedabad in row 11, just behind an emergency exit, British national Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, 40, shocked the world by walking away from a horror that left 241 others dead.
But while his survival may seem frankly impossible to believe, he was sat in a seat which greatly increased his chances of survival compared to other passengers.
In 2012, a Boeing plane was crashed on purpose in the desert for an expensive documentary aiming to find which seats are safest on a plane in the event of such a collision.
And it found that sitting in economy, close to an exit, carried a far higher likelihood of survival than anywhere else.
