Posted on 10/11/2009 5:23:30 PM PDT by ozguy
An Aeroflot Airbus A330-200, registration VQ-BBF performing flight SU-334 (dep Oct 7th) from Havana (Cuba) to Moscow Sheremetyevo (Russia), was enroute overhead the Atlantic at FL350 about 320nm southeast of New York, when the crew talking very good English reported a passenger (German citizen) had become sick and requested to divert to New York's JFK Airport, but changed their diversion destination to Toronto,ON (Canada) just before reaching the top of descent into JFK about 120nm southeast of JFK. The airplane landed safely on Toronto's runway 24R about 2.5 hours after the first decision to divert and about 4.5 hours after departure. The passenger was taken to a local hospital.
Passengers reported, that the German became pale about 30 minutes into the flight initially raising suspicions of being sea sick, but then began to vomit blood about 2 hours into the flight. Two doctors on board provided first aid. The crew decided to divert to New York, but later announced, that their flight wasn't accepted into the United States and they'd need to divert to Toronto.
The airplane reached Moscow with a delay of 3.5 hours.
The German passenger is reported on the way to recovery.
Very odd. How’s this for a theory? Flight diverts towards JFK, but then some big-shot US citizen on board starts complaining that he’ll be in trouble for visiting Cuba, perhaps on business, if he has to land in the USA. So the flight diverts to Canada instead.
The sick guy was vomiting blood. If they suspected ebola or some other wonderful hemorrhagic ick and panicked, the guy wouldn’t have gotten any health care, anyway, the plane would have been quarantined on the tarmac.
re: denied landing in an emergency
Maybe the didn’t declare an emergency. ATC is not going to do it for them, it’s up to the PIC. The flight crew could have decided for whatever reason they would prefer landing in Canada.
We’re not getting the whole story here.
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