Seat 11A's strange survival story
Two plane crashes, 27 years apart, have revealed a chilling and fascinating coincidence: both survivors were seated in seat 11A. In 1998, Thai actor and singer James Ruangsak Loychusak survived the crash of Thai Airways flight TG261, which went down during a landing attempt in Surat Thani, Thailand, killing 101 of the 146 on board. At the time, he was just 20 years old-and sat in seat 11A.
Fast forward to 2025, when Air India Flight AI-171 crashed shortly after takeoff in Ahmedabad, claiming hundreds of lives. Remarkably, the sole known survivor was a British Indian man, Viswash Kumar Ramesh, who was also seated in 11A. The coincidence caught Loychusak's attention when media coverage reported the survivor's seat number.
Loychusak, now 47, expressed shock at the discovery and described it as "spine-chilling." The parallel between the two crashes-and the identical seat number of the survivors-has sparked fascination online and within the aviation community, raising eerie questions about fate, chance, and survival.
"He survived a plane crash in India-sat in the exact same seat as me: 11A," he wrote on Facebook.
Though the seat coincidence is striking, the two crashes were very different. The Thai Airways incident in 1998 had multiple survivors, while the 2025 Air India crash had only one-Viswash Kumar Ramesh in seat 11A. Moreover, the aircraft types were different: an Airbus A310 in the Thai crash versus a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner in the Air India tragedy, meaning the seat 11A layout varied in each. The Air India flight, headed for London, crashed just 30 seconds after taking off from Ahmedabad on June 12, hitting a medical college hostel and killing 241 people.
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