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?

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.

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

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

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

He's kinda got a point

Just throw them out the door

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

"Don't mind the corpse, it's just one of them things. We will be landing at the normal time, and we can only hope that the Ebola he died from isn't that contagious now he's dead. See you on the ground... probably."