Photo: Fairfax NZ / Stuff.co.nz
A medical emergency cut short a 10-hour Air New Zealand flight from Hong Kong to Auckland, causing a 2-hour delay, after what an eyewitness describes as a “comedy of errors”-type of situation where medical personnel couldn’t get on board the plane to remove a dead body.
The plane landed at Cairns Airport, The Cairns Post reports. The emergency occurred after the first hour of the 10-hour flight, when a 60-year-old diabetic man who had forgotten to bring his insulin on board started having problems.
A doctor was in the cabin and he rushed to offer the man all the assistance he could. Gerard Hutching, a journalist for Stuff, says that the doctor and cabin crew did their best to screen the man from the rest of the passengers. They did a good job, too: though they spent a long time with the patient, few of the passengers in the cabin knew something was wrong.
Sadly, the man died, so the pilot asked to land the plane at Cairns. He did so, waiting on the tarmac for airport personnel to come and pick up the dead body. And here’s where the real “comedy” began: because of the early hour, there weren’t enough people on call at the airport.
When a staff and medical crew was eventually put together, they couldn’t get inside the plane. The pilot didn’t want to deploy the aerobridge because that would have meant all passengers on board could have seen the dead body, so the crew eventually came up with a small set of stairs. “Small” being the operative word here.
“They found a small set of stairs, which they put up to the aircraft door,” the source tells the Cairns Post. “They were totally insufficient. The paramedics had to put their kit on top of those stairs, and stand on that, and they were still only chest high to the door. They had to climb into that aircraft to attend to that matter.”
The source says the deceased was eventually removed from the plane via the “insufficient” set of stairs. It took the crew 2 hours to complete what would have otherwise been a smooth and short operation.
A doctor was in the cabin and he rushed to offer the man all the assistance he could. Gerard Hutching, a journalist for Stuff, says that the doctor and cabin crew did their best to screen the man from the rest of the passengers. They did a good job, too: though they spent a long time with the patient, few of the passengers in the cabin knew something was wrong.
Sadly, the man died, so the pilot asked to land the plane at Cairns. He did so, waiting on the tarmac for airport personnel to come and pick up the dead body. And here’s where the real “comedy” began: because of the early hour, there weren’t enough people on call at the airport.
When a staff and medical crew was eventually put together, they couldn’t get inside the plane. The pilot didn’t want to deploy the aerobridge because that would have meant all passengers on board could have seen the dead body, so the crew eventually came up with a small set of stairs. “Small” being the operative word here.
“They found a small set of stairs, which they put up to the aircraft door,” the source tells the Cairns Post. “They were totally insufficient. The paramedics had to put their kit on top of those stairs, and stand on that, and they were still only chest high to the door. They had to climb into that aircraft to attend to that matter.”
The source says the deceased was eventually removed from the plane via the “insufficient” set of stairs. It took the crew 2 hours to complete what would have otherwise been a smooth and short operation.
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