“A customer sadly passed away on board, and our thoughts are with their family and friends at this difficult time,” a spokesperson for British Airways said
Credit: Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto via Getty
NEED TO KNOW
- Passengers spent more than 13 hours with a dead body after a woman died around an hour into a British Airways flight
- A source alleged that, after the woman’s death, crew members “had to isolate the body, wrap it in materials, and move it to a galley at the rear of the plane”
- Following the incident, a spokesperson for British Airways said, “We are supporting our crew, and all procedures were correctly followed”
Passengers spent more than 13 hours with a dead body on a British Airways flight to London.
Approximately one hour after Flight BA32 took off from Hong Kong on Sunday, March 15, a woman in her 60s died while on board the aircraft, according to The Sun, the Daily Express and The Standard.
"A customer sadly passed away on board, and our thoughts are with their family and friends at this difficult time,” a spokesperson for British Airways told the Daily Express. “We are supporting our crew, and all procedures were correctly followed."
Following the woman’s death, a source told The Sun that the family and crew were both “distraught.” However, the situation was not “viewed as an emergency” because the passenger had already died.
“A discussion was had about what to do with the body — with the flight deck’s request to lock it in a toilet rejected by crew,” the source claimed. “So they had to isolate the body, wrap it in materials, and move it to a galley at the rear of the plane.”
“The galley had a heated floor, which some crew had overlooked, and towards the end of the flight, there were claims that a foul smell was present in that region,” the source added.
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When the plane eventually landed at Heathrow in London, the source said that police boarded the aircraft to investigate while keeping passengers in their seats for 45 minutes.
Credit: Tim Graham/Getty
British Airways did not immediately respond to PEOPLE's request for comment.
Ben Vos, the coordinator at Mortuarium Schiphol (Schiphol Mortuary), a unique facility at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport that oversees the process of arranging postmortem care for deceased travelers, previously shared insight into what goes into handling the aftermath of onboard incidents in the rare case of a passenger dying on a plane.
“There’s a special vehicle that comes right to the plane,” he explained to CNN in December 2025. “We can go out of the plane and directly into the vehicle, so lots of people don’t see what we do at the airport.”
From there, a small team follows strict protocol to prepare the deceased individuals for travel to funeral homes, including making arrangements with embalming teams, coordinating with medical facilities if organs need to be donated and connecting families with companies that offer cremation services.
According to a 2013 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, deaths on flights are “rare,” with only 0.3 percent of in-flight medical emergencies resulting in death.
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