- A Turkish Airlines captain died in midair during a flight from Seattle to Istanbul.
- 59-year-old İlçehin Pehlivan’s death led to the flight being diverted to New York.
- The incident underscores the importance of having multiple pilots on board for safety.
An airline pilot died midflight on Wednesday, as other crew members diverted the plane for an emergency landing.
The Turkish Airlines Airbus A350 was flying from Seattle to Istanbul when the captain lost consciousness.
“After the initial medical intervention on board proved ineffective, the cockpit crew, consisting of one captain and one co-pilot, decided to make an emergency landing,” an airline spokesperson, Yahya Üstün, said in a statement.
Data from Flightradar24 shows the A350 flying over Canada’s far north when it changed course and eventually landed at New York’s JFK Airport.
“Unfortunately, our captain passed away before they could land,” Üstün said.
He named the pilot as 59-year-old İlçehin Pehlivan, who had been employed with Turkish Airlines since 2007.
The statement said that a routine health check in March detected “no health issues that would prevent him from performing his duties.”
“As Turkish Airlines, we deeply feel the loss of our captain and extend our sincerest condolences to his bereaved family, colleagues, and all his loved ones,” it added.
Turkish Airlines did not provide confirmation of the cause of Pehlivan’s death.
The incident highlights the reason behind having multiple pilots
Wednesday’s incident illustrates the continued importance of aircraft operating with more than one pilot.
It comes as the prospect of single-pilot operations — in which there is only one pilot on the flight deck at certain points during flights — continues to be debated in the industry.
Back in 2021, Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury said that the A350 Freighter might be a “candidate” for single-pilot operations, noting that the industry faced a labor shortage during COVID.
Regulators and pilot unions have frequently criticized the idea. In July, the European Cockpit Union, a pilots’ union, launched a campaign against single-pilot operations using the tagline: “One means none.”
“One pilot in the cockpit during an extensive period of a flight is a gamble with the safety of our 200 to 400 passengers in the back of the plane and those on the ground,” the ECU’s president, Otjan de Bruijn, said in a statement at the time.
The European Union Aviation Safety Agency is currently undertaking a nearly three-year-long assessment of the potential viability of single-pilot operations in Europe.
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