A British Airways pilot died from a heart attack shortly before he was due to captain a full flight from Cairo to London Heathrow.
The pilot, who has not been named, collapsed in the crew’s hotel not long before he was scheduled to fly a busy plane full of holidaymakers returning home.
Reports said the pilot managed to get to the hotel’s foyer before collapsing, where colleagues performed CPR on him.
Tragically, the crew could not save the pilot and he died at the scene.
The scheduled Airbus A321 flight was delayed while passengers were unaware of the reason behind the wait.
“It has rocked BA. It doesn’t bear imagining if he had suffered a heart attack at 30,000ft,” one unnamed source told The Sun.
Even more tragically, the pilot’s body could not be flown back on the original flight because there was no space for the coffin.
British airway bosses informed the pilot’s family of his sudden death.
“Our thoughts are with our colleagues’ friends, and family at this very sad time,” the company said in a statement.
Pilot deaths have become more frequent in recent months.
Last September, an Ikar Airlines died during a flight between Novokuznetsk to St Petersburg in Russia.
The pilot reportedly felt sick during the flight before the co-pilot was forced to make an emergency landing.
But the flight commander died before emergency services could reach him.
In June last year, British flight instructor suffered a heart attack and died while acting as a safety pilot during a flight.
The student aviator was forced to enact an emergency landing at Blackpool Airport in Lancashire on with the flight instructors head slumped on the chair.
An autopsy revealed the pilot suffered an acute cardiac failure, which resulted in a heart attack.
A post-post-mortem exam revealed the pilot’s arteries were clogged and he also had a blood clot in one of his arteries.
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