Flight crews cannot declare a passenger dead. Therefore it is a medical emergency until a qualified medical professional does so. A physician on board might do so, but that gets muddy real quick legally.
Also, the diversion for a likely dead person isn’t for the dead person, it’s for the family that would sue the airline for carrying on for however long to the destination. They’d argue whether or not the person might have had a chance had they diverted. So legally and financially an airline will try to get seriously ill or potentially dead people off the plane as soon as practical.
Can’t they just make sure they are dead? Put a plastic bag on their head or something? If there’s an air marshal on the flight they might have a gun. That would resolve any doubts about their chances real quick.
What if the person is Rasputin?
Check his ID and make sure he’s not.
A doctor AND a lawyer, impressive
They’ve put a whole lot of effort into making those things safe and you’re here trying to make them murder vehicles??
They are not that safe if people still die in them…
Well, people do die… Its pretty rare for things to go wrong in planes. In the context of this post it seems quite unrelated
Woosh
Aww man? Not again!
even if the head isn’t attached on the body anymore?
Might vary by location, UK guidelines:
Obvious examples that may not require the attendance of a medical professional to pronounce death would be a decapitated or badly decomposed body, multiple body disruptive trauma, where a body is severely burnt or has been subjected to prolonged submersion or has been predated by animals (where the body is missing essential parts).
Not sure there are many opportunities for these cases in a flight, but you never know…
I sat next to a cougar on my last flight, and she destroyed my heart.
I think minced by the engine counts
I was an EMT and we were taught you do CPR until pronouncement, except if there’s obvious signs of mortality, of which decapitation is one. Livor/rigor mortis. Shoes off. All obvious signs of mortality.
I was once told by an EMT that you do CPR unless the spine is clearly severed in any place. Basically the person doesn’t have to be cut in half at the neck. Anywhere above legs counts.
Different folks, different policies and procedures. Ours are similar, barring the shoes. We need socks off or hope remains.
I have my shoes off and I am mortal.
This isn’t Highlander.
“Yet.”
January was pretty fucking mental for a lot of us.
Dude already made his connection, why does everyone else have to miss theirs?
I get it, but it’s an emergency for the passenger that has to sit next to a dead guy for the entire flight.
I’d like to think I could get past it, and just bury myself in my phone, but I think it would still creep me out more than I’d like to admit.
Id legitimately prefer sitting next to a corpse than a child or morbidly obese person
What about a morbidly dead obese? Does it cancel out? What if the cause of mortality was being morbidded by obesity?
Depends how old the corpse is. Might get kind of gross if the heads rotten enough to roll of their shoulders onto your lap.
Sitting next to a child is tame. I was forced to go to a family gathering and we went to a restaurant and one of the relatives on my table had a kid (like less than 10 years old) that was just fucking DROOLING OVER THE PLATE and the USE THEIR SALIAVA-FILLED-HANDS TO TOUCH THE FOOD IN THE MIDDLE OF THE TABLE 😱🤢🤮
God damn use the clean chopsticks that’s on the plates, jesus christ.
I knew to be using 公筷 (shared chopsticks) when I was 8 years old, especially when in public. And I never fucking DROOL over the plates…
aaaaaah I wanted to scream there, but I didn’t wanna cause a scene, so I just didn’t say anything about that kid CONTAMINATING ALL THE FOOD.
Pretty sure I got sick that night…
(It was 2024 December btw, still remember how much my mom just forced me to go to stupid family gathering)
Nah, seats are for the living. Yeet the body off the aircraft, sky burial.
I think it would be fine for me. Ever since I helped a surgeon to hold open a piece of human pelvis that was donated to science so he could experiment with our Hololens app some more, I know that I can apparently deal with dead people okay.
I was the programmer not any sort of medical staff, but since the assistants had left with the other senior surgeon for another assignments the remaining one asked me to hold on to one of the grips and pull a bit for a moment, so he could follow the bone with our 3D marker. Surreal situation.
I mean, at least it’s someone that won’t try to force smalltalk and whatnot (if they did then I’d be worried).
What if the dead turned zombie and started mumbling but otherwise ignored you? Imagine a polite chap, a British zombie, just quite old and mumbling to itself like … old people do.
Would you prefer to continue the flight or be diverted and change seats?
more that there’s a line at which they could potentially have saved the passenger and was the plane still in the air? did they know the emergency was ongoing? legally and honestly as a person who has frequent emergencies probably better to just land as soon as they know someone is dying and/or dead and let the on duty emergency services sort it out as a policy. they don’t have the class of drugs i like on airplanes usually anyways.
if they need someone to sit next to someone who’s passed, as long as they’re in one or two pieces i can do it. i’ve handled enough people after they’ve gone. worked a few months in mortuary in college.
Does anyone have a link to the skit where cops were called on a guy hauling his dead dad in a wheelbarrow through the neighborhood?
Went something like -
Cop: We got calls of a body being hauled through the neighborhood in a wheelbarrow.
Guy: Yup, that’s me.
Cop: Why didn’t you call 911?
Guy: 911 is for emergencies. I woke up and he was already dead. So no emergency.
Cop: Why does that kind of make a ton of sense?
Sounds like the Innocent Criminal from Reno 911
I used to know a pathologist who would get called in on her days off to do autopsies sometimes. She didn’t laugh at my jokes about patients who really ought to lie down, chill, and wait until Monday.
Some people have no sense of humor.
Probably because they are dead.
This is an often overlooked aspect indeed. I’m amazed at how much people underestimate the impact that being dead has on one’s humour.
Delivery becomes impossibly hard. Having a working respiratory system and vocal tract is often expected by the audience, and typical physical humour becomes a stiff challenge.
“Resolving incongruity” is often a key component of humour, but the brain struggles to make sense of something that is out of place when it becomes completely electrically silent.
Gallows humours, hilariously ironic to the living, loses some of its impact when you become the literal subject of the joke.
After dying, our audience is notorious difficult to read, and don’t really offer laughter.
More importantly, humour carries a dopamine reward, which is greatly reduced to zero, which further disencentivizes it.
It’s rather grim, really.
When will we have Reddit style awards?
I’ll take it with pride and with absolutely no guilt since you’re not spending your hard earned money on that particular cesspool.
also, anyone dealing with (insert unique experience to you) on the regular has probably heard your oh so clever joke a dozen times a day for years straight
You mean the smell that starts after like a week unless the corpse is directly exposed to the sun?
I mean the smell from the fact most things void their bowels upon death.
Yeah I’ve seen a number of people recently deceased and I can’t remember one having voided their bowels. This includes after I violently compressed their chest for like 15 minutes over and over to the tune of a hit '70s song.
Sorry that happened to you
It’s not so bad. There are several new songs that are easy to remember to 100 beats per minute.
That’s just what big corporations want you to think. How many times have you witnessed this?
big dave, but he’s just voiding his bowels constantly so i wasn’t sure
In animals? Several times.
In a human? Only once. (only seen one human die)
Just to echo dozzi, I’ve investigated quite a few deaths and had people die and we did cpr… I think I can only remember one that voided the bowels after death, and a few right before (old people die on the toilet surprisingly often).
I’d just volunteer my buttplug
Planes should have emergency buttplugs.
“In case of emergency, break glass”
Do you want to be on the plane when the corpse voids its bowels?
The person(s) sitting closest to the corpse should get to decide whether it is an emergency.
To be fair, there is a smell, albeit a more subtle one than full decomposition, right after death. I’m not talking about excrement, I’m talking about the other smell. When a body dies, think of it not just as a release of the bowels but everything else as well. Cellular release begins such that kissing a corpse goodbye, on the forehead, as often takes place in movies and such, would also be taking on a corpse-y bacterial load. Viral if otherwise infected. In the most benign sense, probably just staph In the unrefridgerated, small enclosed space of a plane you’re going to want to get the corpse hauled off asap.
Not the best article to convey this breakdown, but it illustrates the potential here.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360132325006419
Well before I met her, my wife was somewhere in the funeral industry. (She said she left because it was too morally bankrupt.) As a result, I’ve heard way more about dead people - newly so and otherwise - than I ever expected.
Once, well after I met her but still long ago, we were house shopping for the first time. When we entered one house we went into the basement and encountered a room that had clearly been a hospice room for a while. She got uncomfortable and discreetly whispered to me that she wanted to go.
Once we left the house, she explained that someone had recently died in that room. She also explained that she knew because of basically what you describe here. Neither of us were overly superstitious but it just made her not want to be there, which I consider fair.
Amusingly, previously - I think actually earlier the same day - we had looked at another home that the previous owner had operated as a funeral home. We declined it for a few reasons (primarily part of the property housed a small barber shop and we would have had to decide whether or not to kick him out) but sometimes I wonder about the usefulness of the utilities and hookups that were still in the main house.
edit: Remove an unneeded and inaccurate word. Correct another one.
I’ve performed CPR maybe 10 times, and not performed it probably 10 or 15 more times. I have recollections of some of those times being smelly, but there were smelly circumstances. I recall several of them being strangely devoid of any smell at all. I want some kinda smell, particularly the kind older folks tend to have when they’re ill.
I don’t mean to discount the article. Just my experience with it all.
tell that to the passenger strapped next to the dead guy for however many hours.
Instead, the airlines should just adopt old sea voyage rules. Die on the plane? Out the back you go, DB Cooper style!
Or, better, give them the old Admiral Nelson treatment! Just stick them in an airtight suitcase with the contents of all of those wee little liquor bottles!
He’s kinda got a point
Just throw them out the door
…And then it was two. 💀
I wonder, if theoreticaly, something were to wipe out say…99.99% of the human race, if people would not say this, if they would actually care about every single human left.
Also, who knows what that dude died off? I don’t want to be breathing in that dead guy’s germs.
“Don’t mind the corpse, it’s just one of them things. We will be landing at the normal time, and we can only hope that the Ebola he died from isn’t that contagious now he’s dead. See you on the ground… probably.”
So you’re on a coast-to-coast flight, and someone assumes room temperature. Presumably there are people at one end or another, waiting for the dead person.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to get them to their destination, where there is a 50% chance that there is a family member who could take possession of the body, rather than drop him off in Cleveland, or wherever, where there is a 100% chance that there is nobody there to claim him? That just makes it inconvenient for EVERYBODY.
And if he’s coming from his home, then just leave him in cargo, and ship him home on the return flight.
If it’s me that’s dead, that’s what I’d want. I don’t want everyone to make a fuss and get inconvenienced. Just drop me off at one end or the other. Don’t leave me in the middle of nowhere, so my relatives have to come and find me, and drag my corpse home.
So in addition to your DNR (Do Not Resuscitate), you should get a DNA (Do Not Avert). This is not a real thing.
