What Happens if Someone Dies on a Plane?

Traveler editor Lale Arikoglu was flying through the night from New York to Istanbul the summer of 2017 when a group of flight attendants rushed down the aisle and stopped next to a woman two rows behind her. The passenger had been unresponsive when her seatmate tried to wake her so he could use the bathroom. The crew called for a doctor, and the pilot got on the PA system to let passengers know they would be making an emergency landing in Zurich.

“We all sat in silence, listening to the flight attendants yell at each other in Turkish as they tried to resuscitate the woman while we descended,” says Arikoglu. On arrival, the plane sat on the tarmac; you could see the flashing lights of the police and ambulance waiting outside, she says. The emergency officials boarded the plane and carried the woman down the aisle past bleary-eyed passengers. The Swiss police, struggling to find the woman’s bag—she was traveling alone—asked passengers to claim their own as the police used process of elimination to recover it. The remaining passengers stayed on the plane; an hour went by, maybe two. Without further explanation, the pilot said they were clear to leave and the plane continued on its journey to Istanbul. “Even years later, I think about that woman a lot,” says Arikoglu. “We never found out what happened. She was only around 30.”

It’s not surprising that in-flight deaths regularly grab the headlines. In February, a 63-year-old passenger died on a Lufthansa flight from Bangkok to Munich following a medical emergency on the plane. A little over a month prior, a passenger was reportedly found dead in the plane bathroom during a Jet2 flight from the Canary Islands to England. And in September 2023, an 83-year-old passenger died after experiencing medical symptoms during a long-haul flight from India to Canada. The plane was not diverted, according to CBC News, and the family is pursuing legal action against Air Canada.

How often do mid-flight deaths occur?

Startling news stories like these can understandably leave travelers wondering, what happens if someone dies on a plane? But despite the widespread media coverage of in-flight deaths, “death onboard a commercial aircraft is actually quite rare,” says Dr. Arnold Seid, medical director of Global Rescue, which focuses on medical emergencies while traveling. The National Safety Council’s 2021 report said major airlines experienced no onboard fatalities. A 2021 study published in The American Journal of Emergency Medicine found the global incidence of in-flight medical emergencies was 18.2 events per million passengers with a mortality rate was 0.21 per million passengers. A projected 4.7 billion passengers are expected to fly in 2024—a number that would surpass pre-pandemic levels—so mathematically, it makes sense that travelers might be hearing more about these tragic incidents compared to past years.

It may not be as rare as a baby born in the sky, but in a tight space where nerves are already high, experiencing a death can leave its mark.

The intensity of the experience, in such constrained quarters, magnifies the effect for passengers and staff involved, Dr. Paulo Alves, MedAire’s global medical director, had told Traveler in 2018. While it may not be as rare as a baby born in the sky, in a tight space where nerves are already high, experiencing a death can leave its mark—even years on, as it did for Arikoglu. Airlines, for their part, plan as well as they can: Many carriers have traditionally carried stretchers on board, he says, though the chiller cabinet in the now-retired long-range Airbus A340-500 operated by Singapore Airlines—dubbed a “corpse cupboard” in media reports—was an outlier.

Alves said Arikoglu’s story was also atypical, and per his experience, most in-flight fatalities are not unexpected. When a terminally ill patient wishes to visit a country for the last time—usually to see family—airlines allow them onboard as a humanitarian gesture, even though the low oxygen environment of a pressurized cabin might cause distress. “If you don’t accommodate the passenger, they wouldn’t have their very last wish,” he told Traveler at the time, “So airlines might enter into some accord with the family, agreeing in advance that the flight will not divert. Sometimes the person carries a formal DNR certificate, too.”

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How airlines tackle in-flight medical emergencies

Procedures in the event of a life-threatening medical emergency or death vary by airline. While there are no formal rules enforced by industry bodies like the International Air Transport Association (IATA) or the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), IATA has published guidelines it recommends all crew follow when dealing with an in-flight death. Attempted resuscitation is recommended—there are Automated External Defibrillators available on most planes.

According to IATA’s guidelines, cabin crew should perform CPR until one of the following conditions is met: breathing and circulation resumes, it becomes unsafe to continue (for example, due to severe turbulence or difficulty landing), all rescuers are too exhausted to continue, the aircraft has landed and care is transferred to emergency medical services, or if the person is presumed dead. “If CPR has been continued for 30 minutes or longer with no signs of life within this period, and no shocks advised by an on board Automated External Defibrillator (AED), the person may be presumed dead and resuscitation ceased,” the IATA guidelines say.

During a medical emergency, crew will always ask if there’s a doctor on board. The request isn’t solely about help with revival; only a physician can legally declare a patient dead (as opposed to presumed dead), so if the doctor does make this call, it falls to the pilot to decide next steps. If there isn’t a doctor on board, airlines will connect with someone on the ground: MedAire operates a service called MedLink, for example, which acts as an on-call doctor for pilots in this scenario.

“We have satellite communications with MedLink, whose doctors take primacy in the decision-making process,” a Virgin Atlantic cockpit veteran, who asked to remain nameless as most commercial pilots aren’t allowed to comment on the record, told Traveler in 2018. ”To assist them we have a piece of kit called Tempus, which is a diagnostic device. In essence, you can connect it to the casualty and it monitors a whole range of bodily functions: heartbeat/rhythm, blood pressure, temperature, glucose levels. It will then livestream these to MedLink.” A spokesperson for Virgin Atlantic declined to comment when asked if these procedures remain current today.

It’s an urban myth that deaths require an emergency diversion or landing, says Global Rescue’s Dr. Seid. “There is no mandate to alter the flight path in the event of a death in flight. The pilot must follow certain notification regulations, depending on the country and jurisdiction of the destination airport, as well as company protocol.” Typically, the pilot won’t specify that there’s been a death, but rather a medical emergency; if pilots decide not to divert, the cabin crew will be tasked with handling the body in the interim.

According to the suggested IATA protocol, this may mean moving the deceased to a seat with few other passengers nearby. If the aircraft is full, the body may be returned to the passenger’s original seat or moved to another area that doesn’t obstruct an aisle or exit. Crew are advised to “take extra care when moving the person and be aware of the difficulty of the situation for companions and onlookers.” If a body bag is not available, crew should cover the body with a blanket and close the person’s eyes, IATA says.

In situations like this, the focus is always on dignity: The person might be moved to a crew rest area, or even to first class, where there’s likely to be more space, in the form of a spare seat, where the body can be discreetly placed. IATA spokesperson Perry Flint says that tales of corpses left in their own seat, perhaps covered with a blanket with oxygen mask in place to suggest sleep, are commonplace; there is no data, however, to suggest it as widespread practice, nor would a body ever be hidden in the bathroom—another misconception.

As for costs and logistics involved with post-landing repatriation, it again falls to the individual airline. “There are protocols for transport of bodies and if international borders are crossed. These are complex and may require specialist agencies to facilitate, rather than simply putting the body on board,” says Flint. “The cost may or may not be covered by travel or medical insurance policies.”

MedAire’s Alves, though, provided some context to it all. “At this very moment, probably around one million people are flying across the world—it’s like a virtual city suspended in the air. So over a period of 12 hours, people will be born, and people will die.”

This article has been updated with new information since its original publish date in 2018.