Passengers on board a Lufthansa flight between Germany and Spain were left mid-air without a pilot for 10 minutes last year, due to a medical emergency in the cockpit. The Airbus A321 manifest included 199 passengers and six crew members aboard at the time of the incident, a report has said.
According to the Spanish Civil Aviation Accident and Incident Investigation Commission (CIAIAC), during the journey from Frankfurt to Seville, on February 17, 2024, the captain left the cockpit to go to the bathroom, However, his exit coincided with the co-pilot losing consciousness. As a result, the plane continued to fly on autopilot with no human oversight for 10 minutes.
LUFTHANSA JET FLEW 10 MINUTES PILOTLESS AFTER CO-PILOT COLLAPSED
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) May 20, 2025
A Lufthansa flight flew on autopilot for 10 minutes without any pilot conscious in the cockpit, according to a Spanish government report.
The co-pilot became suddenly incapacitated while the captain was in the⊠pic.twitter.com/ZCS7ATcMXi
To make matters worse, despite audio evidence confirming the copilot suffered âsudden and severe incapacitationâ, while alone on the flight deck he managed to unintentionally interact with some of the aircraft controls during his fainting episode. An air traffic controller tried three times to contact the copilot in question, with no success.
The captain then returned from his loo break but when he inputted a code that alerts the cockpit that someone is trying to enter, he was unable to rouse any response from his colleague. After five attempts and an intercom call from the crew to the flight deck, the captain deployed an emergency code to gain access to the cockpit and seize control of the aircraft.
The copilot received first aid provided by crew and a doctor among the passengers and regained consciousness. Meanwhile, the captain took the decision to request a diversion and an unscheduled landing at Madridâs Adolfo SuĂĄrez Madrid-Barajas airport. The plane landed there without incident approximately 20 minutes later and the copilot was taken to hospital for treatment. His pilotâs license has since been suspended due to an undiagnosed neurological condition that was not detected during the medical tests he underwent before his certification.
Lufthansa told press it has cooperated fully with the Spanish agency behind the report, as well as conducting its own flight safety investigation, but declined to comment further.
Concluding that the incident was an âextraordinary circumstance,â the Spanish authority noted that pilots are trained for emergency in-flight situations affecting colleaguesâ capacity to fly. In a European Commission database, it found that 287 mid-air incapacitations had been reported over the five year period from 2019 to 2024, averaging one every six days.
