Woman, 44, Dies on Plane With 2 Empty Oxygen Tanks
The passenger, returning home from Haiti, collapsed and died aboard an American Airlines flight after initially being told by a flight attendant that he could not give her oxygen.
Posted Feb 25, 2008
from
NYT > N.Y. / Region
Responses to this thread:
jessica:
What a tragedy! When a newscaster introduced this story tonight, he said something like "Imagine you're sitting in first class and the woman near you is a corpse wrapped in a blanket." Yikes! I think I'll stick to coach.
todd:
This story is a tragedy of errors. First the denying of oxygen to the woman and *then* the fact that apparently all the ogygen cannisters were empty.
notgneiss:
I was on a flight once where a guy in the row ahead of me went into a seizure just after we landed -- eyes rolling back into his head, big spasms, unconsciousness, the whole deal. The passenger next to him went nuts and started screaming that they weren't going to let us off the plane, that we were going to be quarantined, completely bezerk.
notgneiss:
It turned out to be an epileptic seizure. Poor guy came to, was pretty embarrassed, and we all disembarked normally.
todd:
On the subject of epilepsy: when i was getting off the train in england on my first day arriving at Cambridge, a man had a seizure crossing the street. i went to help him but couldn't call for help because i didn't actually know how to dial 999 or 112 in the UK. he turned out to be fine. fast forward to christmastime that same year, i'm on a train ride back from london, and the *same* guy across the aisle from me, starts having another seizure. that time he had a harder time coming to, but i was able to tell the conductor that i was pretty sure he lived in cambridge, given that i'd seen him have seizures there before. 
jessica:
It seems like whenever I learn about deaths in flight, the dead body gets moved to first class. That may not always be the case, but that's what seems to make the news. When a woman died during a flight a while ago and news spread about her body being moved to first class, I remember someone, perhaps a journalist, joking about what it takes to get upgraded to first class.
