Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Dead Bodies and Airline Codes

Episode Date: August 28, 2019

Did you know there are airline codes for pilots and flight attendants? And some of them have to do with dead bodies on board? Learn all about it today! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, hello, and welcome to Short Stuff, Short Stuff. Podcast so nice, I said it twice. Okay, there's Chuck, I'm Josh, there's Jerry.

Let's get going everybody, I've eaten up a lot of time here. Yeah, here's the thing with the Jim Wilson airline code, everybody, supposedly it is the American Airlines code for a dead body on a plane. Right. When I first saw this and I thought, that'd be a cool idea, little did I know that it would have been a podcast we don't do yet

called Almost No Stuff. It would have been like 45 seconds long. So we started trading things and we're gonna talk about shipping dead bodies and about other airline codes and other fun stuff like that. Almost no stuff. But I don't know if it's quite true or not, it seems that American Airlines, according to this author,

is Jim Wilson airline code for a dead body on a plane from our former website, HowStuffWorks.com. Still around, still kicking, still doing it. Still going, everyone go check it out. They got in touch with American Airlines and they're kind of denied that that was the truth. They said, who told you that? But it seems like it's very much the truth,

that that's their code. Yeah, here's the thing, the whole premise of this urban legend possible truth thing is that you would ever be in a situation where you're on a plane and some flight attendant needs to tell another flight attendant at the back of the plane that there's something going on with the dead body.

And they can't just walk down the aisle. It's like, oh no, I gotta let you know now. But even still, like that would have anything to do with the flight attendants, anything to do with the cabin, because all dead bodies are shipped in the cargo hold. They don't prop them up in like, you know, 26C, you know? They fly them a certain way.

So there's no reason for them to have a code like Jim Wilson to denote that there's a corpse being transported on this plane. And yet the strangest thing is that it really does seem like they did have that code like you were saying. It's possible because even though they deny it now, the impression I have is that they've somewhat recently, but not in the immediate past,

but in the memorable past did call it Jim Wilson service. And then they just discontinued it and called it what sane people would call it, would be like carefully and tenderly moving human remains because you don't have to have a code name for something like that. Yeah, this was a little frustrating because I wanted there to be a cool origin story.

Nope. And there's not. But apparently there is a page or at one time there was recently on the National Funeral Directors Association website that very much did say or does say instructing their members to use the American Airlines Cargo Jim Wilson service. Right.

Yet American Airlines is going, well, I don't know what you're talking about. I never heard of that. No, and there's a site called Jim Wilson. I believe Jim Wilson.com it might be.org where it's just a single page and there's some links and quotes that kind of support the idea that it did exist if it doesn't still.

There's a Wall Street Journal article from 1987 that specifically says that that is the code for this type of service, handling non-cremated cascaded human remains that it's Jim Wilson service. And they quote a funeral director saying that we say that because it's much better to say something like that than what it actually is around the bereaving family.

Which again, I don't understand that that guy's logic at all doesn't really make any sense. But that, I mean, it was in the Wall Street Journal in 1987. So that definitely lent some support as well. But was it specific to American Airlines? I believe it was. I think it's always been associated with American Airlines,

which makes it even more potentially correct. Yeah. I found out that other airlines supposedly say HR for human remains, so they just abbreviate it. I saw HUM as well. The HUM service? Yep. What does that stand for?

Human, it's short for human. Oh, okay. It's like you got Comfort Plus, Sky, HUM. Human remains that whole thing. Well, I guess that differentiates it from human resources, which is commonly what you think of with HR. Just HR. And all those great meetings

that companies always have about HR. Sure, exactly. And human remains. So, maybe we should take a break because we did dig up some stuff about how you can transport a dead body because you don't think about it. You could die on vacation in another state

or another country. And we'll tell you about that stuff right after this. ["Dio e Zingaro"] On the podcast, paydude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there

when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

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Hey, Chuck, before we get back to this, I have one more piece of fishy evidence. If you search on your favorite search engine, whatever that may be, I certainly don't condone one over the other, although I use Firefox as a web browser. No, I avoid being like the plague. If you type in Jim Wilson, American Airlines,

not service, not human rights, no, nothing, just Jim Wilson, American Airlines, you will find it takes you to the American Airlines human remains site. And it rickrolls you. It does rickroll you, for sure. Wow, so it just directs you right to there, huh? It does.

Well, there you have it. Right. So at the very least, your favorite search engine is in on this whole joke. That'd be pretty cool. And there's also one other part to this joke, too. There's a LinkedIn profile for a guy named Jim Wilson at American Airlines.

And does it say, is this avatar like a skeleton? No, it's like a normal person. Oh, OK. Yeah. Well, that's probably him. I think so. So that's it for Jim Wilson. Here's the deal, though.

If you do have the need to transport a deceased loved one or yourself, like if someone else is dealing with that, obviously, although you could probably prearrange this, what you're going to have to do is work with probably two funeral homes and funeral directors, because you got to get someone on the front end and the back end. You can't just, from what I can tell, A,

you know you can't do it at the origin flight. Like you got to get a known shipper. That's what is known as. These funeral homes and directors are approved as these shippers. But you can't just then say, I'll just pick them up at baggage claim. You got to get someone to do that behind the scenes.

And that's going to be a funeral director as well. Right. So you need a funeral director on each end. And that's going to cost you. It's probably not super cheap. No. It depends. I mean, they have in here anywhere from $1,500 to $15,000.

If it's international, it all depends on the weight, how far you're traveling. And obviously, you can do it by plane, train, or automobile. But the plane will be the most expensive. Yeah. And train is pretty cost effective. Driving the cadaver, the corpse, the human remains yourself is the most cost effective.

Can you do that? You can do it. But you have to follow all the same guidelines and laws that any funeral director would have to follow. And you might not know all of them. If you're really research heavy and you want to have a story about how you drove your dead aunt across the country in your station wagon, you can do it.

The problem is with driving in particular, you're going to go through a bunch of states that might have different laws about transporting human remains. Some say, has to be embalmed. Well, what if your aunt wants to be cryonically preserved? Right. Well, you can embalm somebody like that.

So you have to go around that state. It's just probably way better to hire a funeral director to help with that because they know this stuff and they know how to handle it. Again, it's just pretty expensive. Yeah. And here's something I never knew. Sort of one of the macabre sides of travel insurance.

You can actually pay somebody to take care of this just in case. I guess insurance, if you're on the road for a couple of years or you're going someplace really dangerous or maybe if you're in ill health and you don't have to travel or if you plan on dying by your own hand. Sure. I suppose you can do that. That's a really good point.

I wonder if that's something that people who travel to Switzerland for assisted suicide take into account. Surely they do. Maybe. I mean, apparently it costs less than $500. It's certainly a lot cheaper than a $15,000 international shipment. Exactly. Yeah, I saw as much as $25,000 for international shipping of a body.

You often have to have documents translated because you have to have all your documents, everything from your passport to the certificate that says you were embalmed, everything. It can get very, very, very costly. So yeah, $500. I wonder if the travel insurance people have gotten hip to this thing though. I don't know.

I mean, everyone's always got their hand out. So it's not like you can even put a casket directly into the cargo hold. It has to sit in a specially made tray that is built by a company that also charges money for that. Right, and one of the early manufacturers of air trays supposedly was the Jim Wilson Company. Supposedly. Supposedly.

If you really want to do the right thing and do it cheaper, well, I say it's the right thing, is you will have cremated remains. A much more cost effective, much easier to ship. You can even, you can carry those yourself even if you have the right receptacle. Yes, you can. And so if you are going to fly with cremated remains, a lot of airlines will let you carry them on.

It's like carry on luggage. But that means they have to go through the X-ray machine, which means you have to have, like you can't use like a lead lined urn. No. Because TSA will be like, you can't come on with that and we're not allowed to open it. Now there's a New York Giants lineman. I'm not sure what position he plays.

His name is AJ Francis, who just blew up Twitter putting, I can't remember, I guess it was TSA on blast, because they went through his luggage and he had checked the bag with his mother's cremated remains and they opened up the bag and got his mother all over his stuff in his suitcase. What? He went berserk.

Of course he did. The TSA had like a different story about it. They said that they packed it carefully and it wasn't their fault, but he wouldn't buy in it. So if I were transporting a loved one's cremated remains, I would definitely carry it on. Wow. But you need to have like a special wood box or something like that.

Sure. All of my animals earn wood boxes. Right. At least temporarily, like you can get a nice urn on the other end, but just don't try to transport them through TSA with that really nice urn. Yeah, I like the wood box. I'm not a big urn guy. Oh, so you, okay, I thought you were making fun of me like.

No, no, no. We have these very nice hand-hand carved wood boxes. That's very nice. Not into the urns. Very nice. I do have a little something more though on airline secret codes because I think everyone knows that you can't just get on the intercom as a pilot and say something awful is happening.

You need a little lead time to deal with stuff sometimes. So there's something called Code Bravo. Apparently they use that to distract passengers from real danger so they can kind of take care of things on the down low. 7500 means your plane has been hijacked supposedly. So if you hear that, no good. 7500? Yeah, the number 7500.

Oh man, I'm going to not be able to not listen out for that constantly on every flight now. Do your pilot announcing that? Folks, we've got ourselves a Code 7500. Everyone's like, what? You don't know what that is, and that's probably for the best. So just sit back, relax, and we will probably blow up any time now. It's one of my favorite things. Is it?

It's your best impression. It's my impression of a pilot doing an impression of Chuck Yeager. And then there's 7600 or 7700. That means, respectively, radio failure or general emergency. And then the status of all Code Adam, which you'll also hear at shopping malls or wherever. And that's when there's an incident with a child named after the Adam that was Adam Walsh. Yeah, Adam Walsh.

Yeah. You got anything else? Nothing else. No more codes. Nope. That's it for this short stuff on Jim Wilson. Who knows if it's real or not? I guess if we all make believe that it is real, we can make it real.

So let's do that. And in the meantime, short stuff is out. What you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. All podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.