Air travel can be frustrating, and plane delays particularly so. But when passengers aboard a Southwest Airlines flight from Seattle to Dallas learned the reason why they’d be a bit late getting to their destination, they were more baffled than upset.
The Seattle Times reports that, on Sunday afternoon, the Dallas-bound flight made “a hairpin turn over eastern Idaho” and turned back toward the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport it had just left. Obviously, it’s an unusual move for a flight to turn around midway through. But the flight captain told passengers the truth: They had to turn back immediately because a human heart had been inadvertently left onboard.
Apparently, the donor organ had been mistakenly left on the plane after its earlier trip from Sacramento. It was meant to have been delivered to a local hospital in Seattle, where its valves would be preserved and used for a future transplant — meaning there wasn’t anyone urgently waiting for the heart in Seattle. However, donor organs need to be properly stored, so it was understandably urgent for the heart to get to its destination posthaste.
“We learned of a life-critical cargo shipment onboard the aircraft that was intended to stay in Seattle for delivery to a local hospital,” the airline said in a statement, according to the New York Times. “Therefore, we made the decision to return to Seattle to ensure the shipment was delivered to its destination within the window of time allotted by our cargo customer.”
Thankfully, the heart reached the offices of LifeNet Health in a suburb of Seattle in viable condition. In a statement to the New York Times, LifeNet’s spokesman Doug Wilson thanked the pilots for turning around mid-flight.
As for the passengers on the flight — who eventually arrived in Dallas about five hours late after the heart was unloaded back in Seattle — they were mostly understanding of the urgency that resulted in their delay, albeit a little confused why the heart was transferred via Southwest’s cargo hold.
“People in general were happy to help for some good reason,” said passenger Dr. Andrew W. Gottschalk, an orthopedic sports physician from New Orleans.
Southwest officials apologized for the “inconvenience” to its customers affected by the delay and assured that it would be following up with each of them to offer “a gesture of good will to apologize for the disruption to their travel.”
Source : https://www.littlethings.com/southwest-airlines-donor-heart/