Gruesome: Blood Erupts from Passenger's Mouth and Nose, Killing Him Mid-Flight
A flight from Thailand to Germany was diverted back to its point of origin Thursday after blood began gushing from a passenger’s nose and mouth.
The plane returned to Bangkok, but the male passenger, an unidentified 63-year-old German, had already been pronounced dead, according to an exclusive story by Blick, a news outlet based in Zurich, Switzerland.
The outlet quoted a passenger on the plane, Karin Missfelder, about the incident. Missfelder said she is a nursing specialist at a Zurich hospital.
Missfelder said she noticed right away that the man seated just ahead of her and across the aisle was not doing well.
“He had cold sweats, was breathing much too quickly, and was already apathetic,” she said.
Missfelder said she told a flight attendant that the man needed medical attention. But a young man who responded to a call over the loudspeaker for a doctor just checked the man’s pulse, asked how he was feeling, and indicated he was OK to fly.
“The man looked so bad, I don’t understand why the captain took off,” Missfelder said.
In hindsight, she said, as an experienced nurse, “I should have intervened.”
However, she said, “I saw that a doctor was looking after him, so I didn’t want to get involved.”
The flight attendants gave the man some tea, Missfelder’s husband Martin said, “but he already spit blood into the bag that his wife held out to him.”
After takeoff, he said, the man took a turn for the worse. He kept spitting into the bag, until finally a gush of blood erupted from his mouth and nose.
“It was absolute horror, everyone was screaming,” Martin Missfelder told Blick. Blood was everywhere — liters of it, he said, including on the walls of the aircraft.
Passenger dies mid-flight after liters of ‘blood erupts from his mouth and nose’ https://t.co/fpU1ZxDMdg pic.twitter.com/4E31YkjIqK
— New York Post (@nypost) February 9, 2024
Flight attendants attempted CPR — “Unfortunately a bit amateurish,” Karin Missfelder said — for about 30 minutes before the man was pronounced dead.
“It was dead quiet on board.”
At that point, the pilot turned the plane around to return to Bangkok. Missfelder said she and her husband had a lengthy delay before re-booking another flight.
The New York Post contacted Lufthansa, which confirmed the incident in a brief statement that said, “Although immediate and comprehensive first aid measures were taken by the crew and a doctor on board, the passenger died during the flight.
“Our thoughts are with the relatives of the deceased passenger. We also regret the inconvenience caused to the passengers of this flight.”
The Post reported the plane left Bangkok at 11:50 p.m. Thursday and touched down again there at 8:28 a.m. Friday.
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