Plane victim a diabetic
‘No blame’ in airport death emergency drama
A MALE passenger who died aboard a plane forced to make an emergency landing at Cairns International Airport was believed to have been a diabetic who forgot his insulin.
Sources described the emergency landing on early Monday in Cairns of Air New Zealand flight ANZ80, flying from Hong Kong to Auckland, as a “comedy of errors” after a male passenger who suffered a medical emergency died aboard the Boeing 787-9.
Once the plane landed at the international airport about 2.30am, it was understood an aerobridge was unavailable, and a stair truck used by emergency services to access the aircraft was too small to reach the cabin door.
The incident resulted in paramedics having to crawl aboard the plane to attend to the deceased passenger.
NZ-based website staff reported that one of its journalists, who had been aboard the flight, was told by an airport officer the passenger had been diabetic and forgotten to bring his insulin.
The reporter said a doctor on-board attended to the man for three to four hours, trying to keep him alive before reaching Cairns.
“He was wearing an oxygen mask and at one stage they were using a defibrillator on him,” he said.
Aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas said there had been a “perfect storm” of circumstances that had led to the dramas once the plane landed in Cairns.
“It was unusual that it was 2 o’clock in the morning, and not an operational time (for the airport),” he said. “There’s no real procedure here.
“I don’t think you could point the finger here at anyone being at fault.
“I think it was just a perfect storm of ‘if anything was going to go wrong, it went wrong’.”
Figures supplied to News Corp in late 2017 indicated approximately 34 people had died on international and domestic flights landing in Australia since 2014. There has been at least three reports of mid-air passenger deaths aboard commercial airliners since the start of 2018.
Mr Thomas said it was up to the pilot as to whether to continue to the aircraft’s destination, or make an emergency landing. INCIDENT: The report on the front page of yesterday’s
about the difficulties at Cairns Airport.