While driving an Airbus to Istanbul, İlçehin Pehlivan, a pilot for the Turkish company Turkish Airlines, died of illness this Wednesday, October 9, the company announced.
The plane from Seattle (a city in the northwest of the United States), which left on Tuesday evening, landed urgently at JFK airport in New York. Turkish Airlines spokesperson Yahya Üstün detailed the incident on the social network X (formerly Twitter).
“The captain of our Airbus 350 (…) TK204 plane fainted during the flight. After a vain attempt at first aid, our cockpit (composed of two other pilots) decided to make an emergency landing, but our captain lost his life before landing,” he tweeted.
The pilot, aged 59, who had worked for Turkish Airlines since 2007, had successfully passed a periodic medical examination in early March, the Turkish company said.
The possibility of having a single pilot on board studied
Currently, current global standards, applicable to all commercial flights, require two pilots to be on board at all times. However, as Le Monde reported on September 28, 2024, the European Cockpit Association (ECA), which brings together 40,000 airline pilots from 33 countries, is at war against manufacturers and companies campaigning for the establishment flights with only one pilot on board the aircraft.
Manufacturers believe that their technology is sufficiently advanced to ensure the safety of flights with a single operator at the controls for the majority of a journey. Airlines see in this project the possibility of saving personnel and resources.
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