Australian couple complains that they had to sit next to the body of a dead woman on an airplane
26 February 18:37
An Australian couple complained that they had to sit for hours on board a Qatar Airways plane next to the body of a dead woman.
This was reported by the BBC, Komersant ukrainskyi reports.
Mitchell Ring and Jennifer Colin were on a flight from Melbourne to Doha for a long-awaited vacation. About ten hours into the flight, one of the passengers came out of the toilet, fainted, and died in front of them.
The crew tried to save the woman, but without success. Then, according to the couple, they covered the woman’s body with blankets and tried to move her to business class, but “she was quite large and they couldn’t get her through the aisle.”
Then the crew saw the empty seats next to the couple and asked them to move.
“They just looked at me and saw that there were empty seats next to me, my wife was on the other side, we were in a row of four. They said: “Can you move, please?” and I said: “Yes, no problem”. Then they put the woman in the chair I was sitting in,” Ring said.
The couple claims that the crew did not offer them another seat to move to. Only a passenger in the row behind them offered a spare seat to Jennifer Colin, who is nervous about flying.
So, despite the fact that there were several seats around, Mitchell Ring spent the remaining four hours of the flight next to the dead woman’s body. When the plane landed, passengers were asked to stay put while medical personnel and police boarded. According to Ring, emergency workers began to pull the blanket off the woman and he saw her face.
Colin called the experience “traumatic.” “We fully understand that we can’t hold the airline responsible for this poor woman’s death, but there should be a protocol to take care of customers on board.”
Qatar Airways apologized “for any inconvenience or suffering this incident may have caused.”
“First and foremost, our thoughts are with the family of the passenger who unfortunately died on board our flight,” the company said.
