A man on board a Lufthansa flight from Thailand to Germany died on Thursday. His fellow travelers had to watch helplessly as blood gushed from his mouth and nose. “It was horrible, everyone started screaming.”
An unidentified 63-year-old German man and his wife boarded an Airbus A380 in Bangkok shortly before midnight on Thursday to fly together to Munich. According to witness Karin Missfelder (55), the man was already visibly ill. He is said to have had “cold sweats” and was “breathing much too fast,” Missfelder told the Swiss newspaper Blick.
According to the man’s wife, they had to rush to catch the flight, which made him feel unwell. But after Missfelder, a nurse practitioner herself, watched the man for a few moments, she became seriously concerned. “A flight attendant then responded and asked him if he was OK.” But they still wanted to let him fly.
Fellow traveler Missfelder then informed a flight attendant that the German should be examined by a doctor. A young Polish man answered that call, but he reportedly only asked the man how he felt, checked his pulse and eventually said he was fine.
Once on board, the man’s condition deteriorated dramatically. “They gave him some chamomile tea, but then he started spitting blood into the bag his wife held out to him,” Missfelder’s husband, Martin, said. He spat into the bag again and again and eventually a stream of blood came out of his mouth and nose. “It was absolute horror, everyone started screaming,” Missfelder explains. The man is said to have lost liters of blood, some of which smeared the walls of the plane.
“Dead quiet on board”
The flight attendants immediately began CPR. “Unfortunately, a bit amateurish,” says Karin Missfelder. “But they lasted about half an hour.” It was already clear to her that the situation was hopeless. When the captain announced that the man had unfortunately died, it was “deadly quiet on board”.
“Although extensive first aid measures were immediately taken by the crew and a doctor on board, the passenger died during the flight,” a Lufthansa spokesperson confirmed in a statement. “Our thoughts go out to the family members of the deceased passenger. We also regret the inconvenience caused to the passengers of this flight,” the spokesperson said.
Flight data shows that the plane left Bangkok at 11:50 PM on Thursday and landed back in Thailand at 8:28 AM on Friday. There, the passengers said they had to wait two hours without any guidance from Lufthansa before they were eventually booked on another flight to Germany, with a stopover in Hong Kong.
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