Continental Airlines Flight 61 was halfway through its transoceanic flight from Belgium to Newark when a sign of trouble came: A doctor was needed.
Five of the 247 passengers, including a Belgian interventional cardiac radiologist, answered the flight crew’s call for help and walked along the cabin’s two aisles toward the cockpit.
But nothing tipped the calm inside the plane, a Boeing 777. There were no follow-up announcements, no signal of an emergency over the Atlantic Ocean.
“We asked the stewardesses and they said, ‘Someone fell ill,’ ” said Marlyse Isacson, 62, who lives in Belgium and was flying to the United States to visit relatives.
The only thing even the slightest bit unusual, Ms. Isacson later recalled, was, “some of the staff were very irritated and unpleasant.”
The scene unfolded midway through the scheduled 8-hour, 15-minute flight, which took off at 9:54 a.m. in Brussels (3:54 a.m. Eastern time). What the passengers were unable to piece together — until after they touched down safely at Newark Liberty International Airport at 11:59 a.m. — was that the plane’s pilot had suddenly slumped over dead in his captain’s chair.
As the five doctors approached, it was quickly determined that the cockpit area would accommodate only one. Dr. Julien Struyven stepped forward. He checked the pilot’s vital signs and tried unsuccessfully to resuscitate him with an onboard defibrillator, then declared the pilot dead. He said later that the likely cause was a heart attack.
The captain had “died in flight, apparently of natural causes,” according to Julie King, a spokeswoman for Continental. The captain, who was 60, had 32 years of service with Continental and was based in Newark, Ms. King said.
Later, in an interview with television station KHOU in Houston, the pilot’s widow, Linda Lenell, identified him as Craig Lenell and said he “never, ever had any kind of heart problems.”
“As I understand it, he was in the cockpit, and the co-pilot thought he was sleeping, that he’d nodded off,” Ms. Lenell said, choking back tears in the interview. “He couldn’t wake him.”
Though no one has officially said he died of a heart attack, Ms. Lenell said, “that’s all that we can think of.”
Because he was a captain, Mr. Lenell, a father of six, was required to have a physical examination every six months; his next one was due in September.
The family lived in Texas, Ms. Lenell said. She said that her husband had called her from Brussels just the day before and told her that he was bringing her home some chocolate.
On Thursday morning, as the jetliner approached coastal Canada, the pilot’s body was taken from the cockpit to the crew rest area, according to Les Dorr Jr., a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration. Two other pilots — a first officer with 9,800 hours of flying time and an international relief officer with 15,500 hours — assumed the controls of the plane, officials said.
“The crew on this flight included an additional relief pilot, who took the place of the deceased pilot,” Ms. King said. “The flight continued safely with two pilots at the controls.”
