> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.thecontrail.org/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # I Asked a Funeral Director What Airlines Get Wrong When Someone Dies on a Plane - URL: https://www.thecontrail.org/funeral-director-death-on-a-plane/ - Published: 2026-09-25T14:25:19.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-25T14:25:19.000Z - Description: A woman died on a Qatar Airways flight and her body spent four hours in the seat beside a stranger. I asked someone who handles death for a living what the crew could have done instead. - Author: Zach Benitez - Tags: Editorial, Exclusive About ten hours into a fourteen-hour Qatar Airways flight from Melbourne to Doha, a woman left the lavatory, collapsed in the aisle and could not be revived. What happened next is the part people argued about for weeks. The crew tried to move her toward business class and couldn't get her through the aisle. They asked the passenger in the row beside her, an Australian named Mitchell Ring, to shift over. Then they placed her body, covered in blankets, in the seat he had been sitting in. He stayed there for the remaining four hours. His partner, Jennifer Colin, was offered a seat across the aisle by another passenger. Both described the experience as traumatic, and said the crew kept them seated after landing while authorities dealt with the body. ![A large jetliner sitting on top of an airport runway](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1731047605059-7de4dde9a4ca?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDR8fHFhdGFyJTIwYXJ3YXlzfGVufDB8fHx8MTc5MDI0OTk2NHww&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=2000) Photo by Bornil Amin / Unsplash Qatar Airways said an internal review found its crew acted quickly, appropriately and professionally. The airline described the handling as in line with training and industry standard practice, and said a crew member sat with the deceased passenger until landing. I wanted to know what the alternative looks like from someone who deals with death every day rather than once in a career. So I asked Nicholas Welzenbach to talk it through with me. He's a managing partner at Darling Fisher, a funeral home in the San Francisco Bay Area. [![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/ed/acedfbb2-ff9c-499b-b431-eb36d7539be1/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-24-at-10.37.14.png)](https://www.youtube.com/@KCATTV15?ref=thecontrail.org) [via KCATTV15 / YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@KCATTV15?ref=thecontrail.org) --- ## What Happens on the Ground His first point was that the ground version of this has a step a plane doesn't. "What happens immediately when someone passes away," he said, is going into the motions of next steps. Someone calls hospice, or a nurse calls the funeral director. Then a professional arrives and takes the body into their care. "We're gonna come to the care and bring that loved one away from the family." That removal is the thing that lets everyone else begin processing. It usually happens within an hour or two, and it's carried out by people trained to do it gently. He also pushed back on an assumption about who finds this difficult. Professionals do too. "It's a forever experience," he said of witnessing a death. "It's not something that we forget." --- ## Why a Plane Is Different The obvious answer is that nobody can leave. Welzenbach's answer went further than that. "You're talking about someone who can't walk away, and we can't come to the rescue," he said. In a hospital or a funeral home, moving a body is a practiced skill with equipment behind it. "Our secret weapon is the sheet," he said, when a person is lying down. On an aircraft, a person has died sitting up, in a space too narrow for any of that. Then he described something most passengers would recognize. Your seat becomes yours within seconds of sitting in it. "We've now said and identified in our own minds that this is my spot," he said, and then that changes completely. His point about the setting stuck with me. People ask him constantly whether funeral homes are haunted, which he finds backwards. "The funeral home's not haunted, the cemetery's not haunted," he said. "But as it relates to that plane, that's the place where they've died." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ac/ed/acedfbb2-ff9c-499b-b431-eb36d7539be1/content/images/2026/09/IMG_4216.JPG) --- ## The Logistics We went through the options a crew actually has. Empty seats are rarer than they used to be, since flights run fuller than at any point in the industry's history. Moving a body through a single-aisle cabin affects everyone within several rows. Crew need the jump seats themselves for landing. Taking a lavatory out of service breaks the rules on how many an aircraft must have available. Welzenbach's question cut through all of it. "Who are we burdening with this experience?" His answer was that the fixable part isn't the logistics. It's what people say. --- ## What He Would Change In his industry, language is trained. He told me his team doesn't say sorry for your loss. "We say thank you for your trust." That's a small shift with a lot behind it, and it's exactly what he thinks cabin crew are missing. Cabin crew training is built around safety and service. Sitting with someone through the worst hour of their year is a different skill, and one that nobody hands them a script for. The specifics he'd want are modest. Check in on the people nearby, repeatedly. Let them stand up and move around when it's safe. Cover the person properly, with more than the thin blanket everyone gets handed. Think about whether the whole cabin needs to be told, the way crews handle the return of a service member's casket with an announcement that prepares people rather than surprising them. "No matter what we do with words," he said, "the most important is how you communicate it and how you check in." --- ## The Helpers The last thing he said has stayed with me. He reached for Fred Rogers, and the advice to look for the helpers. "I want to believe that if I was asked to support in that particular moment and sit in that seat," he said, "hopefully I would make that decision to make somebody else's experience" better. That's the part passengers can act on. Unexpected deaths happen on aircraft more often than most travelers imagine, and crews are not always going to have the right words ready. Someone else on board might. If it happens on a flight you're on, and you can be the person who offers the seat or sits with the stranger who has just watched someone die, that's worth more than any procedure an airline could write.