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Supposing you board a plane more than a couple of times a year — chances are good you’ve flown the friendly skies with a dead body for company.
With the spooky scenario making headlines more than once already in 2025 — most recently after a couple flying on Qatar Airways wound up sharing their row with a blanket-draped corpse for hours — passengers can’t help but wonder if they’re the next to find themselves uncomfortably close to an abnormally quiet seatmate.
And while it’s not unusual for people to reach their final destination before the plane lands, experts say that out of the 50,000 bodies said to be transported by airplanes per year, most are riding snugly and securely in the cargo hold.
Despite the fact that each instance receives a great deal of media coverage, “death onboard a commercial aircraft is actually quite rare,” a medical professional speaking on behalf of medivac service Global Rescue told Conde Nast Traveler.
According to a 2021 study published in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine, there were 18.2 medical emergencies per million passengers flown in a given year — and a mortality rate of just 0.21 per million, the article cited.
And even out of that mortality rate, some of the deaths are not entirely unexpected, a representative for another medical support service, MedAire, previously told a reporter for the glossy title.
For example, it’s not unheard of for terminally ill patients to travel one last time as a dying wish, which airlines reportedly do allow despite the risks.
“If you don’t accommodate the passenger, they wouldn’t have their very last wish,” Dr. Paulo Alves said. “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 [Do Not Recusitate] certificate, too.”
And flight crews are supposed to be prepared for the worst — receiving training to handle the situation with maximum sensitivity.
“We want to be as respectful as possible if that [death on board] actually happens,” flight attendant Brieana Young said in a 2021 interview.
“They are put in their seat especially for landing to make sure they are secured in the aircraft, but what is interesting with that is when the aircraft does land, it is considered a crime scene.
“So the police come on and assess the whole aircraft and the passengers. So if that [death on board] ever happens on your flight, expect to be there for a little while after you land,” Young said.
Most frequently, bodies are transported with lots of careful advance planning and adherence to guidelines set out by regulators for repatriating human remains, which are treated much like other cargo — with plenty of protocol to follow and paperwork to be done.
But if the unexpected does happen on a future flight, here’s what you can typically expect, according to procedure outlined by the International Air Travel Association (IATA).
First, crew should try to move the deceased somewhere away from other passengers.
If the flight is full, they may be moved to another area of the plane that doesn’t obstruct any emergency exit routes.
Crew are also instructed to to “take extra care when moving the person and be aware of the difficulty of the situation for companions and onlookers,” the organization urged.
And sometimes, the situation is more than the onlookers can handle.
In 2023, a “traumatized” British Airways passenger went viral in a later-deleted social media post expressing both their anger over having to witness an in-cabin death — and their desire to have their flight refunded.
The “infuriated” traveler said she and her family had been left “extremely sad” by the episode, experiencing “many sleepless nights.”
