Air Canada flight diverts to Boston after captain becomes incapacitated

Air Canada Flight 7664 landed safely at Boston Logan International Airport after the captain became incapacitated on a Newark-to-Halifax trip and a co-pilot took control. The aircraft, operated by PAL Airlines, diverted on Wednesday, June 24, 2026, after Logan emergency crews received an Alert II around 1:37 p.m. and the jet touched down at about 2:00 p.m.

Massachusetts State Police said a crew member suffered a medical emergency, and Air Canada said the captain experienced a medical issue and was removed from the flight deck as safety protocols required. No additional information has been released about the pilot’s condition.

Once the captain was off the flight deck, the aircraft was towed to the gate and passengers were able to deplane. That sequence is the core of the airline safety system at work: when one pilot cannot continue, another qualified crew member is there to keep the aircraft stable, coordinate the diversion and bring the flight down at the nearest suitable airport.

The incident also underscores why commercial aviation is designed around redundancy rather than single-point decision-making. On a scheduled passenger flight, the loss of one pilot does not leave the aircraft without command authority; the remaining pilot can fly the plane, work with dispatch and air traffic control, and complete or divert the flight under established procedures.

A similar Air Canada emergency surfaced on May 12, 2025, when a Montreal-to-Austin flight returned to Montreal after the captain became medically incapacitated. Taken together, the two cases show that in-flight pilot medical emergencies are rare, but they are not hypothetical, and airline crews are trained to treat them as immediate operational events rather than unfold them into larger safety crises.