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  • 7 months ago
From crash survival studies to passenger quirks, here’s the story of how a ridiculed seat became a symbol of survival.

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00:00Seat 11A. Was it fate, luck or just a miracle? It's not a seat most passengers look forward to.
00:0611A sits right next to the emergency exit, often without a window because of how air ducts and
00:11reinforcements are placed on planes like the Boeing 737. In fact, it's earned the nickname
00:16the windowless window seat. Travel forums are full of jokes, memes and complaints from
00:20disappointed passengers who expected a view. One of the most infamous versions, Ryanair's 11A,
00:25another windowless seat that's triggered rants and ridicule from players across Europe.
00:30But suddenly, this much maligned seat has taken on a different meaning. After the Ahmedabad
00:35crash, one passenger, Vishwas Kumar Ramesh, an Indian-origin British citizen, shared that
00:39he was seated on 11A. That part of the aircraft landed on the ground floor of the building
00:45it crashed into. He managed to unbuckle, escape and survive. With burns on his left hand and
00:51the trauma of what he saw inside, he called it nothing short of a miracle. But now many
00:55people are left asking if there's a thing like a safest seat on the plane. I mean, it
00:59depends. In 2012, a Boeing 727 was deliberately crashed in Mexico for research. The rare seats
01:06had the highest survival rates, the front the lowest. Middle seats, especially over the
01:10wings, could be survivable, but often resulted in serious injuries. A separate analysis by
01:15Time magazine in 2015, based on 35 years of FAA crash data, found that middle seats towards
01:21the rare had the lowest fatality rates in survivable crashes. So, is seat 11 lucky or cursed? Well,
01:27for one man, it became a lifeline. Was it divine intervention? Was it fate? Was it a quirk
01:33of chance hidden in numbers? We'll never really know. Tell us what you think in the comments.
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