Rodney McDonald was flying with his wife and two sons when the plane jerked hard to one side. Then it did it again.
“The moment the plane swerved, I knew something was wrong because it was not turbulence,” McDonald told ABC News. “It really felt like someone had jerked the controls, and then it happened over and over again.” His boys started praying.
Air Canada flight AC7664 on June 24 was a regional run from Newark, New Jersey, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, operated by PAL Airlines on a De Havilland Q400 turboprop with 61 passengers aboard. Something had gone wrong in the cockpit.
“One of the flight attendants entered the cockpit frantically, and a few moments later, he was dragging one of the pilots out of the cockpit onto the aisleway of the airplane,” McDonald said.
The captain appeared to be having a seizure. He wasn’t violent, McDonald said, but he clearly had no control over his body, and in a narrow aisle on a moving plane, that was its own danger. McDonald and about four other passengers moved in, with a registered nurse on board directing them. “It was a fairly strenuous 40 minutes of keeping him down and using as many seatbelts as we could to restrain his legs, arms, and chest,” McDonald said.
Medical guidance usually runs the other way. The CDC advises against holding down someone having a seizure, recommending instead that they be turned onto their side with the area cleared and their airway kept open. The passengers were working under a nurse’s direction, with little room and nowhere to go.
Up front, the first officer was alone on the plane. He diverted to Boston Logan, where Massachusetts State Police said the plane landed around 1:40 p.m. after a crew member reported the medical emergency. Emergency responders met the aircraft, and the captain was taken to a hospital. Passengers told WABC that he seemed to come back to himself around the time they touched down.
Air Canada said the captain was removed from the flight deck under safety protocols and noted that its pilots are trained to fly and land without a second pilot. The airline hasn’t said what caused the episode, and it hasn’t made any public update on the captain’s condition.
The passengers did make it to Halifax. The flight left Boston that evening and landed safely, only about seven hours behind schedule.
