What happens when a passenger dies on a plane: "We go from serving dinner to being a coroner"

Jay, a cabin crew chief at a major European airline and a former stewardess at Emirates, has more than a decade of experience working on planes.

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Illustration, Photo: Shutterstock
Illustration, Photo: Shutterstock
Disclaimer: The translations are mostly done through AI translator and might not be 100% accurate.

If a passenger dies during a flight, cabin crew members like Jay Roberts must quickly resolve the situation.

"We go from serving passengers to saving lives, to coroner work, dealing with dead bodies, and then passenger screening," says 40-year-old Jay.

"We have to organize ourselves: 'Okay, we still have to serve breakfast or dinner for 300 people, and we have to deal with this too.'"

Jay, a cabin crew chief at a major European airline and a former stewardess at Emirates, has over a decade of experience working on airplanes.

Like all cabin crew members, he is trained in the event of a passenger's death, but he has only had such an experience once.

He says that plane deaths are "very rare" and that people are more likely to die on long flights because they are not moving for long periods of time.

Some cabin crew members never experience a passenger death during their careers, he says.

Study published in a medical journal New England Journal of Medicine In 2013, it concluded that death during the flight was "rare."

The study, which tracked emergency calls from five airlines to a medical communications center from January 2008 to October 2010, found that 0,3 percent of patients who received emergency medical care during a flight died.

Last month, Australian couple spoke about their "traumatic" experience while on a flight from Melbourne to Doha they sat next to a woman who died during the flight.

Mitchell Ring and Jennifer Collin said that cabin crew placed her body, covered in blankets, next to Ring for the remaining four hours of the flight without offering him the option of moving to another seat.

Qatar Airways (Qatar Airways) stated that they followed appropriate guidelines and apologized for "any inconvenience or stress this event has caused."

BBC News spoke to cabin crew members and other aviation experts about how deaths in flight are usually handled, what the rules are regarding the placement of bodies on planes and what it's like to work on a flight when someone passes away.

Cabin crew members cannot confirm death, this must be done by medical staff.

Sometimes this is done during the flight if one of the passengers is qualified, but more often it is done after landing.

Most airlines follow International Air Transport Association (IATA) guidelines on what to do if a passenger is presumed deceased, although airline policies vary slightly.

Jay Robert

"It is very likely that the body of the deceased will be placed in an empty seat"

In the event of a medical emergency, cabin crew provide first aid and seek assistance from any passengers who are healthcare workers, while the captain uses the telecommunications system to get instructions from doctors on the ground, says Marco Chan, a former commercial pilot and senior lecturer at New University in Buckinghamshire, England.

If necessary, the captain immediately redirects the flight.

However, it is not always possible to save the passenger.

If a passenger is presumed deceased, their eyes should be closed and they should be placed in a body bag, if available, or covered with a blanket up to their necks, according to IATA guidelines.

Space on airplanes is very limited, and it is difficult to find a suitable place for a body to lie without disturbing other passengers and compromising the safety of the aircraft.

According to IATA, the body should be moved to a seat away from other passengers or to another part of the aircraft, if possible.

However, if the plane is full, the body is usually returned to its seat.

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In narrow-body aircraft commonly used for short flights across the United Kingdom (UK) and Europe, there is not enough space for "passengers to really be protected from what happened," says Ivan Stevenson, associate professor of aviation management at Coventry University, England.

Space on these planes is "very, very limited," he says.

"If someone dies on a plane like that, it's quite likely they'll have to be placed in a seat."

Professor Stevenson admits it is "a very unfortunate circumstance, very unpleasant", but that the crew must put the safety of the plane first.

The crew will "try to show respect for the deceased" by placing him in an empty aisle and drawing a curtain, covering him with blankets and dimming the lights, Jay says, but he adds that they may not have much choice.

The body cannot be placed in the kitchen without blocking the emergency exit.

It also cannot be left in the aisles for possible evacuation in case of emergency, nor placed in the crew rest area on long flights, says Jay.

It's also difficult to physically maneuver your body in such a confined space, says Jay.

This was the case on a Qatar Airways flight when, as Ring said, the body of a deceased passenger could not be carried through the aisle of the plane.

In an emergency, a flight is diverted in an attempt to save a passenger's life, but it is usually not diverted if the passenger is already presumed dead, aviation experts and cabin crew members say.

"There's no point in diverting the flight," Chan says.

The captain immediately informs both the airline's operations center and air traffic control of the passenger's death, and the plane is greeted by local authorities upon landing, says Professor Stevenson.

Representatives of local authorities or the airline contact the passenger's family if they were traveling alone.

"I cried in the bathtub"

Ali Murphy, who hosts the podcast Red Eye in which she talks to flight attendants and stewardesses, she experienced the death of a passenger on an airplane during her 14 years of work as a cabin crew member.

A man traveling alone from Accra, the capital of Ghana, to London, fainted in his seat.

After the passenger in the seat next to him informed the cabin crew, they realized that the man was not breathing normally and had no pulse.

The crew moved the man to the aircraft's galley to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).

"You're kind of trapped in a metal box that's not designed to move," Ali recalls.

However, there was more space in the kitchen than usual because the cart had been brought out for serving meals.

Ali and another cabin crew member tried to revive the passenger for 40 minutes, but to no avail.

The captain then decided to divert the plane to Lyon, France, and Ali and her colleague, even though they knew they should sit down and fasten their seatbelts for landing, continued to perform CPR the entire time, she says.

"We didn't want to leave him."

After landing, the passenger was taken away by ambulance.

He was pronounced dead after suffering an abdominal aortic aneurysm, Ali recalls.

"I held him in my arms in the last moments of his life," she says.

"He probably would have chosen someone else for it, but he got me."

Susan Doupé

After the plane took off again for its destination, the passengers "were quite quiet and somber," she says.

But upon landing in London, the passenger started yelling at her for missing his next flight.

"That was the only time I was rude to a passenger," she says.

The death of a passenger during the flight was a traumatic experience for Ali.

"I came home, sat in the bathtub and cried.

"For the next week, I could feel that man's breath," she says.

"It was a bit traumatic for a while."

"For a long time I couldn't watch anything with scenes of QPR."

After experiencing the death of a passenger, cabin crew are offered support that includes therapy and the opportunity to take a few days off work to recover from what they experienced, says Jay.

After the death of a passenger on the plane, Ali and her colleagues filed a report about the incident with their airline, which assured them "that we did everything we could."

After that, she was able to swap shifts with a colleague for a month because she was "quite shaken."

Cabin crew are not used to the death of a passenger on a plane and it can be a very traumatic experience, says Jay.

"We're not doctors, we're not nurses and technicians," says Jay.

"Even though we're trained for it, we don't face it every day, so we're not immune to it."

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