NEW YORK — When Rubina Husain’s husband died aboard an airliner, she shielded her 10-year-old daughter’s eyes so she wouldn’t see her daddy’s body carried through the cabin.
Then, with the corpse covered up in a rear galley, the passengers who had stood around and stared after the man collapsed returned to eating and chatting. The Athens-to-New York jetliner continued on to its destination for eight or nine more hours. And the in-flight movie was shown as planned.
“It felt like a never-ending flight,” says Husain, whose husband died in 1998 after an asthma attack.
Abid Husain, who couldn’t be saved despite CPR and an epinephrine shot, was one of hundreds of people who have died on airplanes in recent years.
“It’s one of the most overwhelmingly emotional situations possible,” said Heidi MacFarlane, a spokeswoman for MedAire, a company that has doctors available on the ground to advise flight crews in a medical emergency. “When you’re the one sitting next to the remains, it can be shocking and upsetting.”
Tough to tally incidents
The macabre fate has received renewed attention since a 44-year-old woman died on a flight from Haiti to New York last week, drawing complaints from her family that the airline did not do enough to respond.
When a passenger is stricken aboard a plane, flight crews and travelers with medical training often pull out emergency medical supplies and rush to save the patient’s life in full view of other passengers.
If the person dies, the crew often throws a blanket over the corpse or puts it in a body bag, an item routinely kept on some planes. The dead passenger is sometimes placed on the floor in a galley area, or kept buckled in his or her seat, since a corpse cannot be allowed to block certain emergency exits. Pilots may consider making an emergency landing, but often they keep going.
Airlines are not required to track or report the medical incidents they handle, so an exact tally of in-flight deaths is hard to find. But fatalities and serious illnesses on airplanes are rare when compared with the large number of people who fly.
MedAire is on call for about one-third of the world’s commercial flights and counted 89 deaths in 2006. That means that if a similar death rate occurs on the other flights, the number of annual deaths exceeds 260.
Likelier to die in crash
MedAire says that each passenger boarding one of the flights monitored by the company in 2006 had at least a 1-in-7.6 million chance of dying on board in a medical incident.
People are far more likely to die in a plane crash, with the likelihood at 1 in 1.3 million in 2007, according to the International Air Transport Association. In 2006, the rate was 1 in 1.5 million.
When a passenger falls seriously ill, flight attendants often contact the pilot. The crew typically makes an announcement to the passengers, asking whether there is a doctor or other medical professional aboard. If there isn’t, the crew can usually reach specialists on the ground.
If the passenger dies, Med Aire advises crews not to place the body in a lavatory. In the past, that has made it difficult to remove the remains from the tiny space after rigor mortis has set in.
While the pilot has the option of diverting the plane after someone has died, often the flight continues on to its destination. If the flight lands in another location, the family of the dead passenger often has to make arrangements to transport the body.
MedAire said medical professionals stepped forward to help in 48 percent of the more than 17,000 medical situations it was called on to help with last year.
