Living ‘dead’

What happens when a commercial plane passenger dies mid-flight? Of course, the other passengers will have to sit it out with the body until the plane lands.

For Australian couple Mitchell Ring and Jennifer Colin, they were the unfortunate seatmates of a woman passenger who died while the Qatar Airways flight was en route from Melborne to Doha, Qatar on 25 February.

The crew covered the body with a blanket and placed it in a vacant seat in the row where Ring and Colin sat as it was too heavy to wheel towards business class, the New York Post (NYP) reports.

Colin took a photo of Ring watching TV as the dead woman sat beside him for four hours during the 15-hour flight.

When the plane landed, the crew told Ring and Colin to let medics retrieve the body first before they could leave their seats.

Meanwhile, an elderly man from Freeport, Long Island, New York has complained that he has not been able to collect his pension for about a year and has no more money to pay his medical bills.

“I’m entitled to that money. They don’t want to give it,” figurine and candle store owner Wilfredo Pagan, 77, told NBC 4, referring to the US Social Security Administration, according to NYP.

“It’s a nightmare. I think they want to kill me,” he said.

It turned out the federal agency had gotten ahead of Pagan and listed him as deceased.

He tried to refute this by personally appearing at the agency and presenting documents but the clerk who saw him thought his Social Security card was fake and confiscated it.

The federal agency now thinks Pagan is both dead and a fraud, NYP reports.