When Vishwash Kumar Ramesh reached his seat on Air India Flight 171, setting off from Ahmedabad to London, he may have been pleased about his window seat and extra leg room.

Mr Ramesh was returning to his family home in Leicester after tending to his business in India and his ticket for seat 11A put him in the perennially enviable position of being next to a window, with enough space to stretch his legs.

A member of the cabin crew would have sat opposite, facing him, during take-off.

But this seat is not merely advantageous from a comfort perspective for a nine and a half hour flight, but also could have been pivotal in saving his life.

Just after the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner fell to Earth into a built-up area less than a minute after take-off, the estimated 60 tons of fuel went up in a plume of flame.