Capt. Lee Collins of the Coalition of Airline Pilots Association said pilots are prepared for emergencies in the air. The pilot of a transatlantic flight died over the Atlantic Ocean, but the jet landed safely.

What: Continental Airlines Boeing 777-200 en route from Brussels Belgium to Newark, NJ
Where: en route
When: June 18th 2009
Who: 247 passengers and 3 flight crew
Why: Four hours into the flight, while over the Atlantic, the captain died. The two first officers took over and landed the plane safely in Newark.

A doctor on board was called to the cockpit, and the on board defibrillator failed to revive the captain who apparently had died of a heart attack.

George’s Point of View

It’s a small world.

Recently I’d been in a conversation with someone about the Colgan flight.

Remember the Colgan flight? The one that crashed in Buffalo? The wings iced over, the captain was ill-trained, and the co-pilot was too inexperienced and too exhausted to know how to respond to the particular emergency. The combination resulted in disaster for everyone on board.

So, I was in this conversation with someone about the Colgan flight, and the question came up about the value of the co-pilot’s experience. The rate of the co-pilot’s pay was released, ($11.00/hr) and that provoked me to write about co-pilots needing “professional” pay. What would happen, we speculated (in this conversation) if the pilot died? The copilot becomes the de facto pilot.

Then, lo and behold, today a pilot dies of a heart attack. Luckily for Continental and everyone on board, there were two co-pilots on hand, and both of them apparently qualified enough to handle the flight. (Apparently so, since they did manage to finish the flight.)

I just wasn’t expecting that speculative question to manifest itself in a headline today.