NEW DEHLI, India – The lone passenger to survive the Air India crash that killed 241 people on board Thursday found himself near debris after being thrown out of the plane and walked to a nearby ambulance for aid, a medic said.

A doctor at Ahmedabad’s Civil Hospital identified the man as Vishwashkumar Ramesh, and Indian Home Minister Amit Shah said he met the survivor. The airline said he was a British national of Indian origin.

“He was disoriented with multiple injuries all over his body,” Dr. Dhaval Gameti, who treated Ramesh, told The Associated Press. “But he seems to be out of danger.”

Another medic said Ramesh told him that immediately after the plane took off, it began descending and suddenly split in two, throwing him out before a loud explosion.

Video broadcast by Indian news channels appeared to show a bloodied Ramesh walking away from the crash site and people running behind him.

Ramesh, who had his boarding pass with him in the hospital indicating his seat 11A, told local newspaper Hindustan Times that he saw bodies and parts of the plane strewn around the crash site.

“When I got up, there were bodies all around me. I was scared. I stood up and ran,” he told the newspaper.

Ramesh was traveling to London with his brother and called relatives in Leicester after the crash, his cousin, Ajay Valgi, told the BBC.

“He only said that he’s fine, nothing else,” Valgi said, adding that the family is “happy that he’s OK, but we’re still upset about the other brother.”

Nayan Kumar Ramesh told Sky News that his brother called his father moments after the crash to say he had survived.

“He video called my dad as he crashed and said, ‘Oh the plane’s crashed. I don’t know where my brother is. I don’t see any other passengers. I don’t know how I’m alive, how I exited the plane’,” he told Sky News.

The Boeing 787 Dreamliner flying to London crashed in a residential area of Ahmedabad shortly after takeoff, killing 241 people on board, the airline said.

An unknown number of people on the ground were killed in the crash, including medical students in a college hostel when the plane hit the building and burst into flames, said Vidhi Chaudhary, a top state police officer in the northwestern city.

A video on social media showed the jet slowly descending as if it were landing. As soon as it disappeared from view behind rows of houses, a giant fireball filled the sky.

This is the first crash of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, according to the Aviation Safety Network database. Boeing said it was “working to gather more information.”

India’s aviation regulatory body said the aircraft gave a mayday call, signaling an emergency, but then did not respond to the calls made by the airport traffic control.

Aviation consultant John M. Cox, the CEO of Safety Operating Systems, told the AP from Los Angeles that while the first images of the crash were poor, it appeared the aircraft had its nose up and was not climbing, which is one of the things that investigators would look at.

“The 787 has very extensive flight data monitoring — the parameters on the flight data recorder are in the thousands — so once we get that recorder, they’ll be able to know pretty quickly what happened,” he said.

The wide-body, twin-engine aircraft was introduced in 2009, and more than 1,000 have been delivered to dozens of airlines, according to the flightradar24 website.