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http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26183203-2702,00.html
Qantas passenger dies on Air France flight
Steve Creedy
October 08, 2009
The Australian

QANTAS passengers who found themselves in Bucharest after an 85-year-old West Australian man suffered a fatal heart attack on an Air France flight have been accommodated on other flights back to Australia.

The Air France Boeing 777 was enroute to Singapore from Paris early Wednesday when the Australian man, a Qantas codeshare passenger who is believed to have had a pacemaker and was in a wheelchair, suffered the attack.

The crew declared a medical emergency and landed in Bucharest, Romania, about 2.45am on Wednesday.

Other Australian passengers on the plane have claimed the aircraft had trouble starting and that a high cabin temperature may have contributed to the man's death.

Melbourne lawyer Ian Dunn, who was on holiday with his wife, told News.com.au the pilot tried to start the plane three times in Paris.

"The really awful thing was that it is quite possible that the heat on the plane when we first got on - which probably lasted about an hour and a half - may well have had some impact on this man dying," Mr Dunn said.

The Melbourne lawyer said a passenger with a thermometer had measured the temperature at more than 35C.

Passenger were also left on the flight for more than five hours without air conditioning before returning to Paris.

It was not clear yesterday whether the auxiliary power unit, which powers air conditioning when an aircraft is on the ground, was operating when the 777 was in Paris but Qantas was told it was not working in Bucharest.

A Qantas spokeswoman said there was a "reasonably lengthy procedure" involved in declaring the man dead and removing his body.

"Following that they were going to continue the flight but they couldn't becasue they had an auxiliary power unit defect and the aircraft was declared unserviceable," she said. "So they ferried a flight over from Paris to collect the passengers and took them back to Paris."

The spokeswoman said Qantas had 46 passengers on the plane and they had all been accommodated on flights via Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan.