Dead body placed in aisle for hours during flight
Credit: dailymail.co.uk.

Dead body placed in aisle for hours during flight

ANTALYA, Turkey — This may be one time when you wish you didn’t request an aisle seat.

Passengers onboard a recent Azur Air flight from Antalya, Turkey to Moscow were forced to sit alongside a dead body after a fellow traveller died mid-air, reports The Daily Mail. The 50-year-old unidentified woman is said to have suffered a diabetic seizure just 45 minutes into the flight.

It is reported that the woman had forgotten to bring her insulin onboard the cabin, instead packing it in her checked luggage. According to her husband (also unnamed), she had just given herself a shot of the medicine an hour before the flight, and that neither of them anticipated her condition would worsen.

It is also believed that the woman was suffering from acute heart failure prior to her death.

The flight crew had no option but to cover the woman’s body with a blanket and lie her down on the floor in the aisle. Rather than make an emergency landing, the captain also decided to fly directly to Moscow, meaning passengers had to endure the duration of the flight in close proximity to a corpse.

Major airlines usually have plans in place to deal with such unexpected tragedies, including moving the deceased to empty rows in first or business class. Some larger planes even have a ‘corpse cupboard’, believe it or not. Assuming that neither option was available onboard the Azur Air flight, the flight attendants had to make do with the aisle.

Tell us, what do you think is the correct way for an airline to handle a situation like this?

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