August 28, 2019 • 13 mins
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!
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
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. And
(00:26):
when I first saw this and I thought that would
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 forty five
seconds long. So we started trading things and we're going
to talk about shipping dead bodies and about other airline
codes and other fun stuff like that almost Stuff. But
(00:48):
I don't know if it's quite true or not. It
seems that American Airlines, uh, according to this author, is
Jim Wilson airline code for a dead body on a plane.
From our former website, how stuff Works dot com. Still around,
still kicking, still doing it, still going, Everyone gonna check
it out. Uh. They got in touch with American Airlines
and they're kind of denied it that that was the truth.
(01:10):
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, like, the whole 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
(01:30):
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 hole. They don't they don't prop them up
in like you know, you know, they they fly them
(01:50):
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 somewhat recently, but not in the
(02:14):
immediate past, but in the memorable past did call it
Jim Wilson Service, and then they just discontinued it and
called it what same 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
(02:35):
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 Director's Association website that
very much did say or does say uh, instructing their
members to use the American Airlines cargo Jim Wilson service. Right,
(02:57):
American Airlines is going, I don't know what talking about.
I've never heard of that. No, And there's a site
called Jim Wilson I believe Jim Wilson dot com. It
might be dot org where it's just a single page
and there's some links and you know, quotes that kind
of support the idea that it it did exist, if
does if it doesn't. Still, there's a Wall Street Journal
(03:18):
article from seven that specifically says that that that is
the code for this type of service handling um non cremated,
casketed human remains, that it's Jim Wilson's service, and they
quote a funeral director saying that we say that because
you know it's it's much better to say something like
(03:39):
that than you know what it actually is around the
bereaving family, which again I don't understand that that that
guy's logic at all, doesn't really make any sense. Um,
but that I mean, it was in the Wall Street
Journal in n so that definitely lends some support as well.
But was it specific to American airlines? I believe it was.
I think it's all always been associated with American airlines,
(04:02):
which makes it even more you know, potentially correct. Yeah. Yeah,
I found out that other airlines supposedly say HR for
Human remains abbreviate it. I saw h U M as well,
the HUM service. What is that staying for human? It's
sure for human. It's like you got comfort plus sky HUM.
(04:26):
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 and because we
did dig up some stuff about how you can transport
(04:46):
a dead body because you know, you don't think about it,
you could die on vacation in another state or another country. Um.
And we'll tell you about that stuff right after this,
(05:13):
hey chuck, before we get back to this. Like, 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 is a web browser. Now I avoid being like
the plague. Um I. If you type in Jim Wilson
(05:35):
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 rolls you.
It does rick roll you for sure. Wow. So it
just directs you right to their Huh it does right.
(05:57):
So at the very least, the the your favorite search
engine is is in on this whole joke. That'd be
pretty cool. And there's also one other part to this
joke to um the uh there there's a linked in
profile for a guy named Jim Wilson at American Airlines,
and does it say, uh, this is avatar like a skeleton.
(06:20):
Um no, it's like a normal PERSONA. 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
pre arrange this, uh, what you're gonna have to do
(06:44):
is work with probably two funeral homes and funeral directors
because you gotta 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
uh at the origin flight, like, you gotta get a
known shipper. That's what is known as the 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.
(07:08):
You gotta 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 gonna cost you. It's probably not super cheap. It depends.
I mean, they haven't here anywhere from to fifteen grand.
If it's international, it all depends on the weight, how
far you're traveling. Uh. And obviously you know you can
(07:30):
do it by plane, trainer, automobile, but the plane will
be the most expensive. Yeah, and train is pretty cost
effective driving the the could ever the corpse, the human
remains yourself is the is um the most cost effective?
Can you do that? You can do it, but you
have to follow all the same guidelines and laws that
that any funeral director would have to follow, and you
(07:52):
might not know all of them. But if you're really
research heavy and you want to have a story about
how you drove your dead aunt across the country and
you're station wagon, you can do it. The problem is,
is UM with driving in particular, you're gonna go through
a bunch of states that might have different laws about
transporting human remains. Some say has to be embalmed. Well,
(08:13):
what if your aunt wants to be a cryonically preserved, Well,
you're you can embalm somebody like that. So you have
to go around that state or it's just probably way
better to hire a funeral director um to help with
that because they know this stuff and they know how
to handle it. Again, it's just pretty expensive. Yeah, and
(08:33):
here's something I never knew sort of one of the
maccab sides of travel insurance, you can actually pay, uh,
you can pay somebody to take care of this just
in case, I guess insurance if you're I don't know,
if you if you're on the road for a couple
of years, or you're going someplace really dangerous, or maybe
(08:54):
if you're in ill health and you don't have to travel,
or if you plan on dying, you know your own hand,
suppose you can do that. That's a really good point.
I wonder if that's something that people who like travel
to Switzerland for assisted suicide take into account. Surely they do, maybe,
I mean, apparently it cost less than five hundred bucks.
Is certainly a lot cheaper than a fifteen thousand dollar
(09:16):
international shipment exactly. Yeah, I saw as much as twenty
five thousand for international shipping of of a body. You
often have to, um have documents translated. Because you have
to have all your documents, everything from your passport to
the certificate that says you were embalmed. Everything, um, it
can get very very very costly. So yeah, five bucks.
(09:36):
I wonder if the travel insurance people have gotten hip
to this thing though. I don't know. I mean it's
you know, 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. And especially made
tray that is built by a company that also charges
money for that right and and one of the early
manufacturers of air trays supposedly was the Jim Wilson Company. Posedly,
(10:00):
I 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't 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 created remains, a lot of airlines
(10:23):
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 leadline urn because t s A
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 line lineman. I'm not sure what position he plays.
His name is a J. Francis who just blew up
(10:46):
twitter um putting. I can't remember. I guess it was
T s A on blast because they went through his
luggage and he had checked the bag with his mother's
created remains, and they opened up the bag and got
his mother all over his stuff in his suitcase. What
he went berserk. The T s A had like a
different story about it. They said that they packed it
(11:06):
carefully and wasn't their fault, but he wasn't buy in it.
So um, if I were transporting a loved one's created remains,
I would definitely carry it on. But you need to
have like a special wood box or something like that. Sure,
all of my animals are in wood boxes right at
least temporarily. Like you can get a nice urn on
(11:27):
the other end, but just don't try to transport them
through T s A with that really nice er. 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 woodboxes. That's very nice. Not not into
the urns, very nice. I do have a little something
more though, on airline secret codes because I think everyone
(11:49):
knows that you can't just get on the intercom as
a pilot and say something awful was happening. Uh. You
need a little lead time to deal with stuff sometimes.
So there's something called code RABO. Apparently they use that
to distract passengers from real danger so they can kind
of take care of things on the down low. Uh.
Se means your plane has been hijacked, supposedly, So if
(12:14):
you hear that, no good, Yeah the number seventy 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, Uh, folks, we got ourselves a code. Everyone's
like what, we don't know what that is, and that's
(12:35):
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 y uh. And then there's seventy six D or
seventy seven hundred that means respectively, radio failure UH or
(12:56):
general emergency. And then the status of all code ADAM,
which you'll also hear at chopping malls or whatever. And
that's when there's an incident with a child. Oh then
it's named after the Adam that was Adam Wash, Adam Wash. Yeah.
Have you got anything else? Nothing else? No more codes. Nope,
that's it for Uh. This short Stuff on Jim Wilson.
(13:17):
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. Uh. And in
the meantime, Short Stuff is out. Stuff you should Know
is a production of I Heart Radios. How Stuff Works.
For more podcasts For my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
(13:38):
favorite shows.
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. And
(00:26):
when I first saw this and I thought that would
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 forty five
seconds long. So we started trading things and we're going
to talk about shipping dead bodies and about other airline
codes and other fun stuff like that almost Stuff. But
(00:48):
I don't know if it's quite true or not. It
seems that American Airlines, uh, according to this author, is
Jim Wilson airline code for a dead body on a plane.
From our former website, how stuff Works dot com. Still around,
still kicking, still doing it, still going, Everyone gonna check
it out. Uh. They got in touch with American Airlines
and they're kind of denied it that that was the truth.
(01:10):
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, like, the whole 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
(01:30):
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 hole. They don't they don't prop them up
in like you know, you know, they they fly them
(01:50):
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 somewhat recently, but not in the
(02:14):
immediate past, but in the memorable past did call it
Jim Wilson Service, and then they just discontinued it and
called it what same 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
(02:35):
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 Director's Association website that
very much did say or does say uh, instructing their
members to use the American Airlines cargo Jim Wilson service. Right,
(02:57):
American Airlines is going, I don't know what talking about.
I've never heard of that. No, And there's a site
called Jim Wilson I believe Jim Wilson dot com. It
might be dot org where it's just a single page
and there's some links and you know, quotes that kind
of support the idea that it it did exist, if
does if it doesn't. Still, there's a Wall Street Journal
(03:18):
article from seven that specifically says that that that is
the code for this type of service handling um non cremated,
casketed human remains, that it's Jim Wilson's service, and they
quote a funeral director saying that we say that because
you know it's it's much better to say something like
(03:39):
that than you know what it actually is around the
bereaving family, which again I don't understand that that that
guy's logic at all, doesn't really make any sense. Um,
but that I mean, it was in the Wall Street
Journal in n so that definitely lends some support as well.
But was it specific to American airlines? I believe it was.
I think it's all always been associated with American airlines,
(04:02):
which makes it even more you know, potentially correct. Yeah. Yeah,
I found out that other airlines supposedly say HR for
Human remains abbreviate it. I saw h U M as well,
the HUM service. What is that staying for human? It's
sure for human. It's like you got comfort plus sky HUM.
(04:26):
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 and because we
did dig up some stuff about how you can transport
(04:46):
a dead body because you know, you don't think about it,
you could die on vacation in another state or another country. Um.
And we'll tell you about that stuff right after this,
(05:13):
hey chuck, before we get back to this. Like, 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 is a web browser. Now I avoid being like
the plague. Um I. If you type in Jim Wilson
(05:35):
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 rolls you.
It does rick roll you for sure. Wow. So it
just directs you right to their Huh it does right.
(05:57):
So at the very least, the the your favorite search
engine is is in on this whole joke. That'd be
pretty cool. And there's also one other part to this
joke to um the uh there there's a linked in
profile for a guy named Jim Wilson at American Airlines,
and does it say, uh, this is avatar like a skeleton.
(06:20):
Um no, it's like a normal PERSONA. 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
pre arrange this, uh, what you're gonna have to do
(06:44):
is work with probably two funeral homes and funeral directors
because you gotta 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
uh at the origin flight, like, you gotta get a
known shipper. That's what is known as the 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.
(07:08):
You gotta 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 gonna cost you. It's probably not super cheap. It depends.
I mean, they haven't here anywhere from to fifteen grand.
If it's international, it all depends on the weight, how
far you're traveling. Uh. And obviously you know you can
(07:30):
do it by plane, trainer, automobile, but the plane will
be the most expensive. Yeah, and train is pretty cost
effective driving the the could ever the corpse, the human
remains yourself is the is um the most cost effective?
Can you do that? You can do it, but you
have to follow all the same guidelines and laws that
that any funeral director would have to follow, and you
(07:52):
might not know all of them. But if you're really
research heavy and you want to have a story about
how you drove your dead aunt across the country and
you're station wagon, you can do it. The problem is,
is UM with driving in particular, you're gonna go through
a bunch of states that might have different laws about
transporting human remains. Some say has to be embalmed. Well,
(08:13):
what if your aunt wants to be a cryonically preserved, Well,
you're you can embalm somebody like that. So you have
to go around that state or it's just probably way
better to hire a funeral director um to help with
that because they know this stuff and they know how
to handle it. Again, it's just pretty expensive. Yeah, and
(08:33):
here's something I never knew sort of one of the
maccab sides of travel insurance, you can actually pay, uh,
you can pay somebody to take care of this just
in case, I guess insurance if you're I don't know,
if you if you're on the road for a couple
of years, or you're going someplace really dangerous, or maybe
(08:54):
if you're in ill health and you don't have to travel,
or if you plan on dying, you know your own hand,
suppose you can do that. That's a really good point.
I wonder if that's something that people who like travel
to Switzerland for assisted suicide take into account. Surely they do, maybe,
I mean, apparently it cost less than five hundred bucks.
Is certainly a lot cheaper than a fifteen thousand dollar
(09:16):
international shipment exactly. Yeah, I saw as much as twenty
five thousand for international shipping of of a body. You
often have to, um have documents translated. Because you have
to have all your documents, everything from your passport to
the certificate that says you were embalmed. Everything, um, it
can get very very very costly. So yeah, five bucks.
(09:36):
I wonder if the travel insurance people have gotten hip
to this thing though. I don't know. I mean it's
you know, 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. And especially made
tray that is built by a company that also charges
money for that right and and one of the early
manufacturers of air trays supposedly was the Jim Wilson Company. Posedly,
(10:00):
I 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't 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 created remains, a lot of airlines
(10:23):
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 leadline urn because t s A
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 line lineman. I'm not sure what position he plays.
His name is a J. Francis who just blew up
(10:46):
twitter um putting. I can't remember. I guess it was
T s A on blast because they went through his
luggage and he had checked the bag with his mother's
created remains, and they opened up the bag and got
his mother all over his stuff in his suitcase. What
he went berserk. The T s A had like a
different story about it. They said that they packed it
(11:06):
carefully and wasn't their fault, but he wasn't buy in it.
So um, if I were transporting a loved one's created remains,
I would definitely carry it on. But you need to
have like a special wood box or something like that. Sure,
all of my animals are in wood boxes right at
least temporarily. Like you can get a nice urn on
(11:27):
the other end, but just don't try to transport them
through T s A with that really nice er. 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 woodboxes. That's very nice. Not not into
the urns, very nice. I do have a little something
more though, on airline secret codes because I think everyone
(11:49):
knows that you can't just get on the intercom as
a pilot and say something awful was happening. Uh. You
need a little lead time to deal with stuff sometimes.
So there's something called code RABO. Apparently they use that
to distract passengers from real danger so they can kind
of take care of things on the down low. Uh.
Se means your plane has been hijacked, supposedly, So if
(12:14):
you hear that, no good, Yeah the number seventy 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, Uh, folks, we got ourselves a code. Everyone's
like what, we don't know what that is, and that's
(12:35):
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 y uh. And then there's seventy six D or
seventy seven hundred that means respectively, radio failure UH or
(12:56):
general emergency. And then the status of all code ADAM,
which you'll also hear at chopping malls or whatever. And
that's when there's an incident with a child. Oh then
it's named after the Adam that was Adam Wash, Adam Wash. Yeah.
Have you got anything else? Nothing else? No more codes. Nope,
that's it for Uh. This short Stuff on Jim Wilson.
(13:17):
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. Uh. And in
the meantime, Short Stuff is out. Stuff you should Know
is a production of I Heart Radios. How Stuff Works.
For more podcasts For my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
(13:38):
favorite shows.
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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