Flight turned around after mother leaves baby at airport

A new viral video captures the moment when the pilot of a flight from Saudi Arabia to Malaysia requests permission to turn around - after a mother on board realised she had left her baby at the departure terminal.

The panicked young woman reportedly begged the crew on Flight SV832 to take action after realised her infant child was still at King Abdul Aziz International Airport, in Jeddah. The pilot immediately requested permission from air traffic control to return to the gate, an exchange captured on the video.

The pilot can be heard saying: “May God be with us. Can we come back or what?”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The operator is then heard asking another colleague about the protocol in such an event, reports Gulf News.

“This flight is requesting to come back... a passenger forgot her baby in the waiting area, the poor thing,” the operator says.

There are contradictory reports as to whether the flight had taken off or was still on the tarmac.

What has been confirmed is that the mother was reunited with her unharmed baby. It is rare for planes to turn around for any reason besides serious health or technical emergencies, but the pilot has been praised online for his rapid response to the distressed woman’s pleas.

How the mother came to forget the infant is unclear, “but it would not be the first high-profile story of a parent unwittingly leaving a child behind,” says The Daily Telegraph. The newspapers notes that former PM David Cameron once left his then eight-year-old daughter Nancy in a Buckinghamshire pub.