Then-33-year-old Phil Bradley was the sole survivor in the 1959 crash of Piedmont Airlines Flight 349 near Crozet, Virginia. The earliest known sole survivor is Linda McDonald. On 5 September 1936, she survived a Skyways sightseeing plane crash near Pittsburgh that killed nine other people, including her boyfriend.

Yes, history is filled with "miracle" survivors of catastrophic aviation accidents. One of the most famous is Vesna Vulović, a flight attendant who survived a 33,330-foot (10,160-meter) fall without a parachute in 1972 after a bomb exploded on her plane; she was trapped in a tail section that landed on a snowy slope. In 1971, Juliane Koepcke fell 10,000 feet while strapped to her seat and survived 11 days alone in the Amazon rainforest. More recently, in June 2025, a British national named Viswashkumar Ramesh was reported as the sole survivor of an Air India crash involving 242 people. These stories of "lone survivors" often involve extraordinary physics—such as a seat acting as a protective shell or falling into dense foliage/swamps that cushion the impact. While rare, these survivors become global symbols of hope, though many suffer from profound survivor's guilt and PTSD after emerging from wreckage that claimed the lives of everyone else on board.