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Aviation experts can’t explain how one passenger survived the “unsurvivable” Air India crash in Ahmedabad, India on Thursday—but they say there are easy ways to boost your odds of evacuating a plane quickly and safely.

India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB)—the equivalent of the NTSB in the U.S.—is tasked with investigating the country’s aircraft accidents and incidents. Investigators from both bodies classify serious accidents as “survivable” or “unsurvivable” after determining the crash impact and the condition of the aircraft after the incident. Aviation safety experts have described Ramesh’s escape from the crash as nothing short of a miracle. “I'm assuming this crash will be classified as nonsurvivable, even though this one guy somehow walked out of that big ball of fire and smoke,” Mary Schiavo, former inspector general of the Department of Transportation, said. “I would have considered this to be an unsurvivable event, given the fact that you had 30,000 gallons of jet fuel erupt into a massive fireball,” Guzzetti said. “A crash like that is not supposed to be survivable,” agreed Dr. Daniel Adjekum, an aviation safety researcher at the University of North Dakota, who framed the incident as an outlier.

Since the Air India accident Thursday, Google searches for “seat 11A” have skyrocketed and questions about the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner’s configuration have proliferated in online forums such as Reddit. Seat 11A was an economy class exit row seat on the plane near the galley, directly behind business class. Guzzetti says he generally books an exit row because it “provides an advantage if there’s a typical evacuation, and those are very rare events.” Schiavo always tries “to get an exit row in case the plane is evacuated. And if I can’t get an exit row, I try for an aisle seat in the next two rows directly behind the exit row because, in an emergency, people tend to move forward—so if I'm ahead of the exit row, I'm going to have a harder time going against the flow.” Ironically, in the Air India crash, the exit door broke and Ramesh escaped through an opening in the fuselage, the BBC and other outlets reported. “Investigators will look at the breakup sequence of the fuselage,” Cox said. “But until we get that analysis of how the thing broke up, then and only then can we figure out why 11A was a survivable place to be in the airplane when, sadly, none of the other seats were.”

“Normally after a major accident, people get freaked out,” Adjekum said. “But there is no empirical evidence showing survivability is correlated to where you sit, especially when it comes to an air crash.” “Unless you know the type of accident you’re going to have, you cannot predict which seat is safest,” agreed Cox. “If you’re going to run into a mountain, it’s safest in the back of the back of the airplane. If the plane hits something and starts coming apart, then sitting over the wing is safest, because that's generally a stronger area. If the tail gets knocked into the ground, then you want to be in first class. So you tell me what type of accident we're going to have, then we can determine the best seat. But nobody can predict that.”

When deciding what to wear on a flight, experts say leave the high heels and sandals in your luggage. Instead, think comfortable clothes that allow you to move quickly in an emergency. “It’s wise to wear shoes and long pants and shirts with sleeves—not just because of the chance of fire, but you might be scrambling out across hot coals and pointed, jagged wreckage, and you don't want to do that in your bare feet or in flip flops or in shorts,” Guzzetti said. “You want to protect your flesh from sharp objects and heat.” Think about what your clothing is made of, Adjekum advises. “Avoid materials that are easily combustible—polyester, rayon, and so on—because in the event of a fire, they stick to the skin and can cause severe burns.”

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