Story here

Eeeeeeeeeeeeep

Well I suppose - what could they do

How sad for the poor lady and her family.

Organgrinder's right though. What else could they do?

I can't believe they don't have precautions set for such things. Having to 'wedge' a corpse into a seat using pillows is horribly macabre. I'm not saying this sort of thing happens a lot, but I think planes should have a space somewhere to store a corpse so one doesn't have to wake up next to a dead body - how gruesome!

yuck i flew back from delhi on the 10th i wasnt in first class and i had three babies near me all crying all the way home but think i would prefer this to a dead lady poor lady and family how bad

That's awful. The poor lady and the family! But I suppose there was nothing else to do.

Space is simply at too much of a premium to have some left spare 'just in case' that would only get used once in a billion flights.

I'd have absolutely no problem with it. It's only a dead body, I just don't get (and have never got) what's so yukky about that...

Just as long as the airline didn't charge her estate for the upgrade....

Ah, but that's the problem in contemporary society. People just don't cope with death at all well.

I remember when I was a 10-year old my great-aunt being laid out in her coffin in the front room of her house and all the family, including we children, being taken in to see her. She spent the night in the house (with the immediate family) and then was taken off to church for the funeral and burial. That's how many families did these things 40 or so years ago. So, I grew up having seen dead people and not feeling that worried about it. Funerals were normal things and nothing to be scared of.

Today, it's very rarely done that way and though we see death on the TV screens every day, it's become very, very unusual to see a corpse for real.

With regard to this particular story, I read somewhere recently most airlines expect 10 or so people to die on board each year - a tiny fraction of the people they transport. What does surprise me is that they carry no "body bags" such as you might find elsewhere for such emergencies. At least the old lady could have been covered up then, even if she'd had to occupy a seat somewhere. That might have minimised the "horror" for the fellow passengers.

One would think it'd be only fair to warn the chap, though - the impression I get from the story is that he was asleep when they moved the body into the neighbouring seat, which would surely be a bit of a shock for anyone on waking up...

Actually it doesn't say that the chap was in the neighbouring seat. It just says "near". And inevitably, on an aeroplane, every seat in one section is near every other seat.

I meant to say, that it's impossible to judge as we don't know exact details. (eg where they were sitting etc)

I have no problem with the dead they cant do anything to you. Its certainly not yuky and generally they look as though they are sleeping. I would rather be sitting next to a propped up dead body than one propped up in a body bag!

Thing is, it was first class. Now I've gone BA business class and you get lie-flat beds. Last time we had to walk out through first class (I think that was deliberate to try and get us to upgrade even further ) Anyway, they have even more luxurious lie-flat beds in first class. So all they'd need to do is lay a body down, put a blanket over it, and do up the seat-belt. Shouldn't be any propping neeed...