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.
On a related note, why don’t more people just drop dead while driving a car? Like I can’t think of a single story that I’m aware of that went “yeah he had a heart attack and then ran the car off the road”
I feel like it should be a daily occurrence
I lost the first car I’d purchased outright to a "dead behind the wheel’ driver, and I wasn’t even in it!
A friend had borrowed the car, just a couple weeks after buying it, and was stopped at an intersection - An older man had a heart attack, barreled through the intersection, hit a pole, and then kept turning and t-boned my friend in my car. No injuries (other than the dead guy) but my car was totaled. Insurance payout was super!
I imagine a contributing factor is that most people who drop dead randomly are of an age where they generally don’t drive, or don’t drive as much.
I wonder if it’s one of those kinds of deaths that just makes the local paper unless they take out a lot of people with them.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7847085/ article discussing 21 fatal heart attacks while driving during a period of time in china
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23343022/ article discussing the results of the Finnish Road Accident Investigation Teams (RAITs) on fMVAs in Finland during 2008-2009. 11% of these were because of “disease attack.”
These articles make it seem like unless there’s careful investigation after the fact, it’s very difficult to know for sure if illness caused the accident.
So it probably is a daily occurance, depending on how many fatal accidents happen in your country. (and depending on a million other factors, most likely)
Yeah no I knew someone that had that happen, he managed to park on the emergency lane and it took a while for someone to figure out that he was dead.
I knew someone that was orphaned in high school because his dad had a heart attack, crashed, killed himself and his wife.
Probably because after they do, they crash and it will generally be assumed the crash is what killed them.
It’s going to be real weird when self driving cars finally work and sometimes cars just pull up with a dead body in it.
See Harry Chapin.
https://harrychapin.com/misc/howdied.shtml
I used to work with a lady who, upon missing her shift, the next day the managers were all going around quietly telling staff that she died on her way to work, that she’d had a massive stroke while driving. New fear unlocked that day. But yeah I guess you don’t hear about it on the news because the may just assume car accident is what causes the fatalities.