BA passengers share first class cabin with dead traveller

Daily Mail UK ^ | 23:01pm on 4th December 2006 | RAY MASSEY

[james500]

First Class travellers on a British Airways transatlantic flight were horrified when they were forced to sit next to a dead body for three hours.

The elderly passenger had died of a heart attack just minutes earlier and was carried into their cabin to continue the journey to America.

[Tijeras_Slim]

I'll go my entire life without farting (I'm female) and probably let it all out at the very end. My husband will be so shocked!

Blame the dog.

[Esther Ruth]

Before there were retirement homes, nursing homes etc the norm was to have family, loved ones stay at home as they got up in years and they would die there also - and then be layed out and waked at home also in the living room. People were around death more, they were more comfortable with it and all. The last few days and weeks were not in a hospital but at home. So people have been nurtured to be uncomfortable, unfamiliar, awkward with it all except those maybe in health care and such.

You go through antique stores and will see boxes of photos and there will be pictures of relatives all layed out beautifully in the front parlor of the home with flowers and all surrounding them.

People this day and age are also more awkward about it because they are less spiritual, unchurched and even if they are religious the churches have taken the pc route in these regards and don't talk about death naturally and comfortably, all quite sterile and denial mode.

Then the religious aspect of this, that the body is something spiritual, sacred, holy - a vessel made by God Almighty Hismself, a physical body that He chooses to dwell in while we are on Earth - so with this an unbelievable reverence toward the physical body that was created by God by others during life and the death, so if this spirituality was present there would not be the awkward fuss about the little seemingly odd matters that are commented about.

[Froufrou]

Why didn't they think of that before? Perfect for those long flights to Europe!!!

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Having made 6 two-week Pacific crossings by ship as a mere lad I can say with complete assurance, we never lost a single passenger.

[azhenfud]

"My rule of thumb is pee every change you get."

I did that when I was an infant and young toddler.....

[HamiltonJay]

That's what everyone does when they die... muscles relax, and everything evacuates.

[null and void]

I hope to go like this person on the plane, quickly and without warning. Not soon, mind you, but when I am about 99.

I hope to go quietly in my sleep, like my grandpa.
Not screaming in terror like his passengers...

[null and void]

Dang.

[null and void]

If yer gonna have cardiac arrest, that's the place to do it...

[null and void]

The passangers weren't "horrified" at all.

For once they didn't have to fight for the armrest...

[null and void]

I reinstituted it when I started working in a cleanroom. It just takes too long to unsuit and run to the can.

[null and void]

And funkle. *sigh* second time today.

[webheart]

I was hoping someone looking to be offended would click on this thread, thanks.

I'm glad you got your wish. But isn't it revealing how some minds turn to such juvenile concerns as whether the deceased wet himself or soiled himself? There is plenty of intest in the fact that the passengers were concerned more about the interruption of the movie than with the passing of a life, and even more important, the widow he left behind, without any comfort in the little seat. But let's be sure to ask whether or not it was his bodily functions that the passengers were being so British about. And no, I'm not offended.

[IslandJeff]

Jack Stallings, the bush pilot

Neat name. You just can't make this stuff up!

[Silly]

Are these stories related?

Flatulence, not turbulence forces plane landing in Nashville

[Pilsner]

I met a guy in England once whose whole business was returning dead Brits for burial.

He was already an undertaker, and while on vacation in Spain an Englishman dropped dead in his hotel. He took a professional interest in all of the arrangements that had to be made to get the dead man from Spain to Great Britan. He also found out that, due to coincidence, physical activity they were not used to, and trying to drive rented cars over mountain roads after too much Rioja, a modest number of the millions of Brits who visited Spain every year, died.

When he got back home, he read up on the rules and regulations, and began acting as an agent to repatriate dead Brits. Rather than handle the burial, he just did the paper work and handled the arrangements to get the deceased from the morgue in Spain, to the local undertaker hired by the family in Britian.

Within a few years he had sold his funeral home, and made a good living just doing the paper work to get the bodies back home.

[MadIvan]

Had I run across his corpse in First Class, I would have been tempted to ask what he had for dinner.

Yes, BA meals aren't all that good.

Regards, Ivan

[Balding_Eagle]

I was put off by those comments about the guy that died, but so what? That's par for those types of thread. I was also really put off by someone who is surprised by them. Where have they been living, under a rock?

[null and void]

Hmmmm, I'll past that on to a dear friend who is a mortician. I think she'd like a change...

[Paleo Conservative]

Why didn't they think of that before? Perfect for those long flights to Europe!!!

If you're willing to pay $10,000 round trip.