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.

Dude already made his connection, why does everyone else have to miss theirs?

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.

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?

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.

Instead, the airlines should just adopt old sea voyage rules. Die on the plane? Out the back you go, DB Cooper style!

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.

tell that to the passenger strapped next to the dead guy for however many hours.

Do you want to be on the plane when the corpse voids its bowels?

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

He's kinda got a point

Also, who knows what that dude died off? I don't want to be breathing in that dead guy's germs.