The Travel Detective

Strange But True

Locations in this article:  London, England

Airplane landing gearApril 3, 2007

Strange but true…

A woman dies on a British Airways flight and the flight attendants “upgrade” the body to… first class.

Two passengers fall off a Princess cruise ship in the middle of the night. Hours later…they are rescued…unharmed.

A teenager is thrown off a Continental Airlines flight heading from Newark to Hawaii… for coughing.

It’s been a wild week in travel…but not an unusual one. And it’s all about responsibility and making sensible decisions.

Let’s analyze the stories: I’ve heard of people dying for an upgrade, but you can’t make this story up. On a British Airways India-UK night flight, a woman died.

Confronted with this awkward and sensitive situation, what did the flight attendants do?

Did they rope off a lavatory and move the corpse in there for the duration of the flight?

Did they clear out five people from a row of coach and place the body there, covered by a number of blankets? Did they move the body to the crew rest area? No.

They quietly carried the body right past sleeping passengers in coach and business class, and deposited it in a first class sleeper seat. When the full-fare first class passenger awoke an hour later, he found himself sitting by a corpse for the duration of the flight!

PlaneGroundTo make matters worse, when the plane landed in London, he was required to stay on the plane and be interrogated by British authorities. (I can imagine the questioning: Honestly, officers, I woke up and this woman was…well…dead.)

No, I don’t know her. I didn’t feed her anything…And no, I’m not the father of her baby. (Oops, wrong case…).

So what did we learn from this incident? That most airlines have no common sense policies in place for dealing with such situations. And airlines that specialize in long haul flights really should have procedures to handle such an unfortunate scenario. At least one carrier, Singapore, revealed that on its long haul flights, it actually carries “cupboards” to store bodies…But of course, the real unanswered question: did the woman get mileage posthumously?

Next up: the idiotic — and irresponsible — passengers who fell — or jumped — from the Grand Princess as it was heading south to Mexico from Galveston.

Rhetorical question of the day: Was alcohol involved?

Not the first incident, and probably won’t be the last. But amazingly, the couple was rescued.

Not an easy task. I was actually on the Grand Princess on its inaugural cruise, and the captain wanted to show me what it was like to deal with a man overboard situation.

Because of the sheer momentum of the ship, it took the Grand Princess nearly three miles to make an emergency full stop. Then the captain turned the ship, and in a figure eight pattern, while attempting to adjust for currents and drift, did a search pattern. That was in daylight. In this case, it was in the middle of the night.

Miraculously, the couple was spotted, and rescued…

And finally, the story of the coughing teenager who was thrown off the Continental Airlines jet before it took off from Newark to Hawaii. In this case, there was some issue raised about the arbitrary way in which the young woman was handled. I disagree. It’s one thing if a passenger becomes sick or disabled during a flight. But if a passenger is sick (or in this case has severe discomfort) on the ground, and there is a likelihood that the sickness or ailment could later jeopardize the flight, forcing an expensive in-flight diversion, then the captain was perfectly within the parameters of common sense — for both the other passengers and the airline itself — to have that person removed and treated.

In this case, the young woman could not stop coughing. The captain had to make a decision: Hold the plane at Newark until she felt better and stopped coughing? Or take off with her coughing and run the risk of having to turn back, or divert? In my estimation, the captain made the right decision.

And Continental flew the teenager — no longer coughing — back to Hawaii the next day.

All these stories are about responsibility. And common sense.

British Airways flight attendants could have handled the dead woman issue better.

The couple falling off the ship? They should be fined the cost of the rescue, since the U.S. Coast Guard was also involved.

As for the coughing teenager, much as I often berate airlines for consistent stupidity and mismanagement, in this case Continental did the responsible thing.

For more of Peter’s blogs, check out the “Travel Detective Files”.