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TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — Passengers were left horrified after a 63-year-old man died in the middle of a flight after coughing up “liters of blood,” leaving the aircraft walls splattered with blood last week.
According to the Daily Mail, the unidentified man and his wife boarded their flight from Bangkok, Thailand, to Munich, Germany, when he became “visibly ill before his condition rapidly deteriorated.”
The man’s wife reportedly said her husband boarded the flight with cold sweats and was “breathing much too quickly” because they “had been forced to run to catch the plane,” Daily Mail reported.
Passenger Martin Missfelder said his wife, Karin Missfelder, who’s a nursing specialist, alerted a flight attendant that the man needed to be checked out by a doctor. The pilot proceeded to call for a doctor over the intercom; that’s when a Polish medic took the 63-year-old’s pulse and deemed that he was OK, the Daily Mail reported.
The man was given chamomile tea, but at that point, he was already spitting blood into a bag that his wife was holding for him. As the plane took off, the man’s condition worsened, and a “gush of blood” began spilling out of his nose and mouth, covering the walls of the aircraft.
“It was absolute horror, everyone was screaming,” Martin told Swiss outlet Blick. Martin claimed that the man lost liters of blood.
Karin recalled that the staff had tried to give the man CPR for about 30 minutes, but it was “clear the man could not be saved,” the Daily Mail reported.
“It was dead quiet on board,” Karin said as she described the aftermath of the horrific scene.
According to the Daily Mail, the captain announced over the intercom that there had been a death on board, and the flight returned to Bangkok, where passengers were forced to disembark.
“Our thoughts are with the relatives of the deceased passenger. We also regret the inconvenience caused to the passengers of this flight,” Lufthansa said in a statement to the Daily Mail. “Please understand that we generally cannot provide any further details in the event of medical emergencies for reasons of privacy.”