Summary
A couple on a Qatar Airways flight from Melbourne to Doha was forced to sit next to a deceased passenger for four hours after she collapsed and died mid-flight.
The flight crew moved the woman’s body to an empty seat beside them and denied their request to change seats.
Qatar Airways apologized but did not offer the couple support after the incident.
The couple, en route to Venice, criticized the airline’s handling of the situation but are trying to continue their trip despite the distressing experience.
Poll:
Would you rather sit next to a dead person or a crying baby for 4 hours on a plane?
Personally, I’d take the dead person.
I seem to be in the minority, but the baby.
Kids are awesome. Little bundles experiencing new things constantly. It’s fucking cool.
dead bodies sometimes shit or urinate themselves. and your just being hotboxed in a plane.
Babies shit and piss themselves constantly.
A baby’s shitty diaper pales in comparison to the recently deceased evacuation of bowels of an adult human.
Keep in mind, dead people evacuate their bowels. It’s not a mummy type situation, but more of a sitting next to an open, used by concert goers, porta potty situation.
I mean, only sometimes. Stuff kind of comes out of bodies at it’s own pace.
So do babies. At least the dead person just stinks and isn’t also screaming.
Baby shit =/= Adult shit
For the parents, no.
Plus they’re easily cleaned and changed.
I have bad news for you about babies. And many people make sure to fully evacuate before a flight because they will do anything to avoid that bathroom.
Are you sure because too many times I’ve been on a 2hr flight and there’s a line for the lav the entire time. It’s a mystery I will never understand.
At least this one had the courtesy to go to the toilet first
Yes
I hate that your offer is appealing. But only briefly – the baby was never going to win.
I rather sit next to a baby than half the people on flights
Is there an option to turn even more of the other passengers into bodies?
Wait! No, don’t put me on the list -
A baby is annoying, but they can’t really help it. I can blame the parents for bringing a baby on a long flight, but I can’t get mad at that shit.
Kids on the other hand. I once had 4 unruly kids sitting on the row behind me and they were insane. It was a relatively short flight (6 hours), so a smaller plane with those really thin seats. The plane had the 3-3 configuration of seats, so mom, dad and the 4 kids took up the entire row.
The kids were between 4 and 12 years old. Dad was in the corner sleeping, not giving a fuck. The two older kids (12 and 9 I think) were playing their Switches on the other side of the aisle next to dad. The two younger kids (4 and 7) were behind me with mom. Mom was in the corner with the smallest kid and they were wild. The 7 year old was constantly smashing against their tray and thus my back, kept kicking directly against my back and screaming all the time. The smallest alternated between laughing loudly and crying (shrieking more like). The smallest also stood on the tray, grabbing at my seat and head, diving in between the seat screaming PEEKABOO at full volume directly in my ear. The smallest one would also like to run in the aisle or visit the other kids, but the other one didn’t want to move so the kid snuck in between the other one and my seat.
Mom was trying, but 4 kids on your own is a big ask. About 20 mins before we landed the two younger ones passed out and they were pretty damned cute. But in the end my back hurt, I was exhausted and deaf in one ear.
The annoying part was, the rest of the plane was filled with old people who didn’t make a peep all flight, just sat there and read, listened and slept. But we just had to be in the worst place on the plane. Sitting behind kids may be annoying, but at least they don’t use your back as a punching bag like when you sit in front of them.
World’s (or at least, That Plane’s) Worst Dad
Thanks for nothing, Peter.
I would’ve grabbed the kids arm and traumatised him for life
I doubt the dead person had much control of the situation either.
Sometimes I am reminded of a book I read as a kid wherein one of the main characters dies and is eventually resurrected. She says that when you die, you don’t lose awareness or move on, you just passively occupy the body without the ability to move (like locked-in syndrome, I guess, but I didn’t know that as a kid and don’t know whether it was even recognized back then). In particular she describes the horrors of her autopsy.
If that were true, I wonder whether the person within the cadaver would be embarrassed to have caused such inconvenience. I know I would.
Damn it, I’ll take the corpse
100% the dead person. I’d rather jump than stay next to the baby.
You do realize it’s still on the ground when you find out who you’re sitting near. Until they’ve closed the doors, you’re completely free to nope the fuck out of there and hope for a later flight.
That’s why they’ll just jump. They won’t be far from the ground.
Yeah, apparently people took my comment seriously.
If autism is a spectrum, you’re still a boolean
Right, sure …