Southwest Airlines returns after human heart left aboard plane.
 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/u...QQnVtq1qTgkeq0

Definitely not a common story.

The heart was not for direct transplant but would be parted out for values and tissue.

Not for transplant, not a story, imho!

Still a pretty big and expensive FU by the Cargo team..

Well, they DO have a heart as their logo...

And the plane was flying to Love Field...

Actually, this is for the patient who having a heart transplant. Someone who forgot a humans heart. Those doctor are responsible to delivery a heart to the patients. That's why his patient who had a heart transplant.

I'm glad it worked out in the end. :eek:

Anyway, hearts for transplant generally go on special charter flights if they need to travel out of the area, but I could be wrong on that.

Hearts (and other organs) for direct transplant are generally not sent via commercial carrier, but in the rare circumstances when they are, they're carried on by a dedicated agent. In this case, the organ wasn't for transplant but rather parts, which has a longer acceptable timeframe for delivery (up to 48 hours).

Typically mediocre reporting that swallowed corporate BS regarding a bad decision that inconvenienced an entire plane for a commercial shipment.

First of all how did the pilot know the heart was left in the hold? Obviously somebody from the ground contacted him after it took off. If the ground crew were doing their jobs they would have contact the shipper to determine if in fact the cargo was "life critical" which it was not. According Mayo the hearts typically last 4 hours so this one would have been useless for a real transplant.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-pro...t/pac-20384750

Basically southwest made a bad call to accommodate a cargo shipper and then tries to cover by lying about nature of shipment. Did they offer decent comp to anyone on the flight?? I bet not.

Don't get me wrong I think most of us would understand if a plane needs to divert because somebody's life was depending on a critical organ transplant. But not what happened here.

From the linked article: "We sincerely regret the inconvenience to the customers impacted by the delay, and we are following up with them with a gesture of good will to apologize for the disruption to their travel,” the airline said in a statement. Flight 3606 arrived in Dallas five hours late.