Flight crews cannot declare a passenger dead. Therefore it is a medical emergency until a qualified medical professional does so. A physician on board might do so, but that gets muddy real quick legally.
Also, the diversion for a likely dead person isn’t for the dead person, it’s for the family that would sue the airline for carrying on for however long to the destination. They’d argue whether or not the person might have had a chance had they diverted. So legally and financially an airline will try to get seriously ill or potentially dead people off the plane as soon as practical.
I get it, but it’s an emergency for the passenger that has to sit next to a dead guy for the entire flight.
I’d like to think I could get past it, and just bury myself in my phone, but I think it would still creep me out more than I’d like to admit.
So you’re on a coast-to-coast flight, and someone assumes room temperature. Presumably there are people at one end or another, waiting for the dead person.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to get them to their destination, where there is a 50% chance that there is a family member who could take possession of the body, rather than drop him off in Cleveland, or wherever, where there is a 100% chance that there is nobody there to claim him? That just makes it inconvenient for EVERYBODY.
And if he’s coming from his home, then just leave him in cargo, and ship him home on the return flight.
If it’s me that’s dead, that’s what I’d want. I don’t want everyone to make a fuss and get inconvenienced. Just drop me off at one end or the other. Don’t leave me in the middle of nowhere, so my relatives have to come and find me, and drag my corpse home.
Does anyone have a link to the skit where cops were called on a guy hauling his dead dad in a wheelbarrow through the neighborhood?
Went something like -
Cop: We got calls of a body being hauled through the neighborhood in a wheelbarrow.
Guy: Yup, that’s me.
Cop: Why didn’t you call 911?
Guy: 911 is for emergencies. I woke up and he was already dead. So no emergency.
Cop: Why does that kind of make a ton of sense?
Sounds like the Innocent Criminal from Reno 911
tell that to the passenger strapped next to the dead guy for however many hours.
He’s kinda got a point
You mean the smell that starts after like a week unless the corpse is directly exposed to the sun?
I mean the smell from the fact most things void their bowels upon death.
I’d just volunteer my buttplug
That’s just what big corporations want you to think. How many times have you witnessed this?
Skimming 4chan random a couple of months ago, there was a post on the worst of India. One picture was of a train route with a few tracks and a half dozen people strewn dead across the ground. It was impossible to tell the circumstances, but they were clearly dead and broken. No one cared. All the surroundings were business as usually and no one was responding or concerned. By the way things looked, some had been there for awhile.
Nope. Fuck that. I want nothing to do with such a pathetic amoral society. I will gladly miss my connection out of respect for life, anyone’s, everyone’s. I care about you digital neighbor reading this now. My slight inconvenience is not worth more than your life.
It is probably very difficult to transport a dead person post mortem, and lessening that journey for your family is important too.
Impressive to feel you understand a country of 1.4 billion people from a single picture, let alone call them “pathetic” and “amoral.” The world’s most populous country with dozens of languages and cultures. One single picture. Like I said, impressive…ignorance.
I lived in India for years, in multiple cities north and south, and I’ve traveled all over the country by train on my own as a foreigner. Easily some of the best experiences of my life.
India is dozens of nations posing as one single nation state. To generalize it is impossible. To generalize it from a single picture is a degree of simplistic thinking I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered from an adult.
Ah yes, 4chan, the pinnacle of unbiased moral discussion and verified news. A beacon of truth and honesty.
Agree with your respect for life sentiment tho.
Yeah unfortunately for you I think the post is bullshit. People die on planes all the time. I mean, enough for airlines to have protocols for it.
They used to just put people in first class seats with shades and a newspaper but apparently that was “insensitive”.
Seriously, who reads newspapers these days?
The more people there are, the less they value each other.
It is simple supply and demand, which we are all still subject to, regardless of our belief of being divinity.
Dude already made his connection, why does everyone else have to miss theirs?
Connected straight to God
“Don’t mind the corpse, it’s just one of them things. We will be landing at the normal time, and we can only hope that the Ebola he died from isn’t that contagious now he’s dead. See you on the ground… probably.”
Do you want to be on the plane when the corpse voids its bowels?
The person(s) sitting closest to the corpse should get to decide whether it is an emergency.
To be fair, there is a smell, albeit a more subtle one than full decomposition, right after death. I’m not talking about excrement, I’m talking about the other smell. When a body dies, think of it not just as a release of the bowels but everything else as well. Cellular release begins such that kissing a corpse goodbye, on the forehead, as often takes place in movies and such, would also be taking on a corpse-y bacterial load. Viral if otherwise infected. In the most benign sense, probably just staph In the unrefridgerated, small enclosed space of a plane you’re going to want to get the corpse hauled off asap.
Not the best article to convey this breakdown, but it illustrates the potential here.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360132325006419
Well before I met her, my wife was somewhere in the funeral industry. (She said she left because it was too morally bankrupt.) As a result, I’ve heard way more about dead people - newly so and otherwise - than I ever expected.
Once, well after I met her but still long ago, we were house shopping for the first time. When we entered one house we went into the basement and encountered a room that had clearly been a hospice room for a while. She got uncomfortable and discreetly whispered to me that she wanted to go.
Once we left the house, she explained that someone had recently died in that room. She also explained that she knew because of basically what you describe here. Neither of us were overly superstitious but it just made her not want to be there, which I consider fair.
Amusingly, previously - I think actually earlier the same day - we had looked at another home that the previous owner had operated as a funeral home. We declined it for a few reasons (primarily part of the property housed a small barber shop and we would have had to decide whether or not to kick him out) but sometimes I wonder about the usefulness of the utilities and hookups that were still in the main house.
edit: Remove an unneeded and inaccurate word. Correct another one.
I used to know a pathologist who would get called in on her days off to do autopsies sometimes. She didn’t laugh at my jokes about patients who really ought to lie down, chill, and wait until Monday.
Some people have no sense of humor.
Probably because they are dead.
This is an often overlooked aspect indeed. I’m amazed at how much people underestimate the impact that being dead has on one’s humour.
Delivery becomes impossibly hard. Having a working respiratory system and vocal tract is often expected by the audience, and typical physical humour becomes a stiff challenge.
“Resolving incongruity” is often a key component of humour, but the brain struggles to make sense of something that is out of place when it becomes completely electrically silent.
Gallows humours, hilariously ironic to the living, loses some of its impact when you become the leteral subject of the joke.
After dying, our audience is notorious difficult to read, and don’t really offer laughter.
More importantly, humour carries a dopamine reward, which is greatly reduced to zero, which further disencentivizes it.
It’s rather grim, really.
When will we have Reddit style awards?
Just throw them out the door
…And then it was two. 💀
I wonder, if theoreticaly, something were to wipe out say…99.99% of the human race, if people would not say this, if they would actually care about every single human left.
Completely agree. Maybe some people were feeling queasy though, idk.
