A 63-year-old man died during a Lufthansa flight this week after losing “liters of blood’ in a scene that terrified passengers.
The unidentified man boarded a Lufthansa flight from Bangkok to Munich with his wife on Thursday, according to Swiss-German outlet Blick.
Witnesses Martin and Karin Missfelder told Blick that they sat in the row diagonally behind the male passenger and his wife. Karin Missfelder said the man looked unwell when he boarded the plane.
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“He had cold sweats” and “was breathing much too quickly,” Karin Missfelder said in a translated quote.
The man’s wife said his breathing and appearance looked off because they rushed to catch the flight, but the symptoms worried the crew. Despite their initial hesitations, the crew allowed the man to remain on the flight.
Karin Missfelder, a nursing specialist at the University Hospital in Switzerland, told Blick that her concerns for the man persisted, prompting her to tell a flight attendant that a doctor should examine the man. At this point, the plane’s captain arrived and briefly spoke to the man.
“He then called for a doctor over the loudspeaker and a young, around 30-year-old man from Poland with poor English looked at the German,” Karin Missfelder said.
Martin Missfelder said the doctor however did little to treat the man beyond checking his pulse and asking how he felt. Soon, the man’s health drastically deteriorated.
“They then gave him a little chamomile tea, but he already spit blood into the bag that his wife held out to him,” Martin Missfelder said.
At one point, Martin Missfelder said blood gushed out of the man’s nose and mouth. He said the man lost “liters of blood,” some of which splattered onto the aircraft’s walls.
“It was absolute horror. Everyone was screaming,” Martin Missfelder told Blick.
Flight attendants immediately jumped in and attempted to resuscitate the man, Blick reported.
“It was dead quiet on board,” Karin Missfelder said.
Data from flightradar24, an online air traffic tracker, showed that the flight departed from the Bangkok International Airport at 12:07 a.m. before diverting back amid the chaos. Karin Missfelder told Blick the man, now dead, was carried into the galley as the plane returned to the airport.
A Lufthansa representative confirmed the death to Blick.
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Representatives for Lufthansa did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Last year, Lufthansa made headlines after a flight from Texas to Germany experienced severe turbulence that sent people and food flying into the air.
One passenger told Business Insider she hit her head on the plane’s ceiling. “It felt like it hit the eye of a tornado,” Rolanda Schmidt told BI. “It would not stop. I thought we were going down.”
That flight made an emergency landing near Washington, DC.
