British Airways Flight BA2158 safely landed on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia on November 3rd. The passengers and crew immediately headed from their long flight to check in at a luxury hotel. As everyone was heading into the hotel lobby, the horrified passengers watched as their flight’s Senior First Officer fell on the ground and died suddenly.
The pilot’s name has not been released. All we know about him is that he was 47 years old, in seemingly good health, and well-liked by all his friends and colleagues at British Airways. No cause of death has been released.
The incident was awful for the passengers on the plane, and not just because someone died. They were all probably thinking the same thing: “What if that had happened 20 minutes ago when he was landing the plane?”
British Airways released the typical boilerplate statement expressing condolences to the pilot’s family. A British Airways employee told reporters, “The Senior First Officer was very popular and his death was completely out of the blue.”
We had a brief lull in the number of pilots flopping over dead between late 2023 and early 2024. The number of pilots dying from “Suddenly” has started to surge once again as we head into the fall of 2024.
On October 21, the news broke that a 30-year-old First Office for QantasLink Airlines in Australia had died suddenly. Friends and family described young and healthy First Officer Harrison Allchin as “superhuman” and were devastated by his death from “Suddenly.”
Like British Airways, Qantas forces every employee to be fully up to date with their COVID shots and boosters. Many Australians are so terrified of the coronavirus that employees at Qantas were refusing to come to work if they found out a co-worker was unjabbed.
“Why should I come to work and have other co-workers that come make me sick?” was the statement in one complaint that Qantas released.
Um… you might get sick, dearie, but your young and healthy co-worker just died because of a dangerous experimental medicine that he was forced to take, which wouldn’t have protected you or him from the coronavirus. The vaccinated are still terrified of catching COVID from the unvaccinated.
Earlier in October, a Turkish Airways plane on a one-way flight from Seattle to Istanbul had to be diverted for an emergency landing when the pilot died in the cockpit. The passenger jet was fully loaded with passengers. The pilot, 59-year-old Ilcehin Pehlivan, started to feel faint and passed the controls over to his co-pilot before dying from “Suddenly.”
The flight crew tried to revive Pehlivan with CPR but was unsuccessful. When the plane diverted to JFK International for an emergency landing, paramedics rushed onto the plane to find Pehlivan dead. Like Harrison Allchin and the unidentified British Airways pilot, no cause of death has been reported.
That seems to be the pattern with all these sudden deaths among pilots. No cause of death is ever determined.
Also early in October, a couple was flying their Beechcraft King Air 90 plane from Henderson Executive Airport in Las Vegas to Monterey, California. The husband, Eliot Alper, died suddenly at the controls of the plane. His wife, who is not a pilot, radioed Air Traffic Control for help. She had never flown a plane before and had always been content to ride shotgun with her husband at the controls.
An air traffic controller successfully talked her through how to land the plane. Fortunately, the runway was more than two miles long and she was miraculously able to land the plane. She used the entire runway and then some. Emergency vehicles on the ground had to nudge the plane to finally slow it down.
The good news is that we haven’t had any catastrophes in the air yet as a result of pilots dying from “Suddenly.” The bad news is that a lot of people are still dying and public health officials pretend that nothing is happening.
We’ve been reporting on the sudden and unexplained deaths of pilots, children, and even zoo animals for the past three years since the rollout of the COVID shots. (Yes, zoo animals have died from “Suddenly” after being jabbed with the mRNAs.)
Are we simply going to continue pretending this isn’t happening as a society and accept it as the new normal?
