AA flight attendant helps deliver baby in 737

American Airlines flight attendant Patricia Sund holding the newborn boy she helped deliver minutes earlier in the back row of a 737 as it flew from Haiti to Florida.

by JASON WHITELY

Original Story: http://www.wfaa.com/news/AA-flight-attendant-helps-deliver-baby-in-737-96702679.html

FORT LAUDERDALE - "My new slogan is going to be, "Coffee? Tea? Deliver your baby?," quipped Patricia Sund, an American Airlines flight attendant.

Patricia Sund helped two doctors deliver a baby boy in the last row of seats, on Friday, June 11, as they flew from Port-au-Prince, Haiti to Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

A Boeing 737 is the stage for this performance yet being very much lacking for space to deliver a baby but anything is possible when the flight attendants are put to the test of their training and cool heads during a situation.

"It took quite a bit of improvisation to figure out a way to position the mother, the medical kit, two doctors, the equipment needed and a way to pass what was needed in-between and over the seats to the attending physicians in order to make this delivery a successful one," Sund said.

Flight 2288 was about 35 minutes from landing in (KFLL) Fort Lauderdale when an extra passenger was announced on the flight and added to the passenger manifest according to American Airlines.

"Watching that baby being born and having him placed in my arms 30 seconds after he was born was an incredibly raw and emotional moment for me," Sund reflected. "It will remain one of the highlights of my Flight Service career. It also most likely makes this crew the newest members of a very small club of flight attendants who have assisted with the birth of a child inflight."

American Airlines said the baby boy was born healthy.

This is a fine example of what flight attendants are trained to do and what so many passengers take for granted. So the next time a passenger thinks that flight attendants are "glorified sky waitresses" hopefully they will remember hearing about this beautiful incident over the skies of the Atlantic and know that the flight attendants are there for more important things than passing out peanuts and opening cans of Coke!

Baby Born On Southwest Flight That Lands At DIA

Flight Continues On To Salt Lake After Diversion

DENVER -- A flight heading from Chicago to Salt Lake City was diverted to Denver Friday morning after a baby boy was born mid-flight.

Southwest Airlines Flight 441 was at about 30,000 feet, and 100 miles north of Denver, when the pilot asked if anyone had medical training. A woman had gone into labor and the captain made a call to divert to Denver -- the closest airport, said Paul Flaningan, a Southwest spokesman.

'They announced on the PA and asked if anyone had any blankets,' Morse said. But before the plane could land, the woman gave birth in flight. 'About 15 minutes later they got on the PA and announced we had a new passenger, a baby boy.' 'They immediately turned the plane around mid-flight and we landed in Denver. They got them out, the dad, mom and baby and took them off to the hospital,' Morse explained. 'All the Southwest staff did an excellent job, really calm. Everything was great. Everything seemed really healthy,' he added.

Flight attendants had thrown down a blanket in the back of the 737 and a doctor who was on the flight delivered the baby boy with the help of Stat Med, a company Southwest contracts with to help flight attendants with medical emergencies on flight.

"We now have a new passenger," said a flight attendant on the jet's public address system after the quick delivery.
The plane landed at Denver International Airport at about 10:20 a.m. The mother and her newborn were taken off the plane by paramedics and transported to Medical Center of Aurora, South Campus by ambulance.

The father and the couple's other kids, who were on the flight, also got off the plane in Denver.
"Mom and baby are doing fine," Flaningan said.
"It sounded like everything went pretty regular -- nothing out of the ordinary," said Denver Fire Division Chief Charles McMillan.

"The baby was delivered in flight, so we drove to the hospital," said Denver Health spokeswoman Dee Martinez, referring to the paramedics' role in getting the mom and baby to the hospital. "It's really the people on flight who did everything."

The flight continued on to Salt Lake City.
Flannigan said in-flight births don't happen very often.
"We might have passengers who are further along and have contractions. It's fairly rare to have a baby born in mid-air," Flaningan said.

"We're going to call the TSA on this guy," Flannigan said, laughing, when asked about the unscreened passenger.
Flight 441 originated in Columbus, Ohio with stops scheduled at Midway Airport in Chicago, Salt Lake City and Boise, Idaho before ending at Spokane, Wash.

Nursing mom files complaint against airlines

By Emily Bazar and Sam Hemingway, USA TODAY
A clash between a nursing mother and a flight attendant has sparked a discrimination complaint,
an airline investigation and a grass-roots protest.

Emily Gillette, her husband, Brad; and their then 22-month-old daughter, River,
were removed from an Oct. 13 flight from Burlington, Vt., to New York after a flight attendant asked Gillette to cover up while she was breast-feeding the girl. Freedom Airlines operated the Delta Air Lines flight.

Photo: Emily Gillette was asked to leave a Delta flight after breast-feeding and refusing to cover-up her daughter River, who was 22 months old when the incident occurred.

Gillette, 27, filed a complaint against both airlines last week with the Vermont Human Rights Commission alleging that the airline violated a state law that allows women to breast-feed
"in any place of public accommodation." The airlines have until Nov. 27 to respond,
Gillette's attorney, Elizabeth Boepple, says.

In a show of support, about 30 mothers and fathers and dozens of children staged a "nurse-in"
protest at Burlington International Airport on Wednesday.
"I've always nursed my children when I'm on a plane," says Carolyn Beer, 34, of Burlington.
"Their ears hurt with the altitude change, and it's a strange environment for them. The alternative is to let your kid scream."

The Gillettes, of Espanola, N.M., boarded the flight shortly before 10 p.m.
They had been in Vermont visiting friends and were headed to New York to see other friends and Emily Gillette's sister. Gillette took the window seat in the second-to-last row, she says, and her husband took the aisle.

She began nursing River, using one hand to hold her shirt closed. She says: "I was not exposed."
But the flight attendant approached, tried to hand her a blanket and asked her to cover herself, she recalls. "You're offending me," Gillette quotes the woman as saying.
"I'm not doing anything wrong and I will not cover up," Gillette says she said in response.
Spokesmen for the airlines declined to discuss specifics of the incident.

The flight attendant walked away, Gillette says, and a few minutes later,
a ticket agent boarded and said the flight attendant had ordered them removed.
The airline arranged for a hotel for the family for the night and a flight with a different airline the next morning, but Gillette wasn't satisfied.

"No woman should ever be ashamed of breast-feeding," she says.
She wants "both airlines to create policies that protect a woman from being harassed
for feeding her child on an airplane."

Delta is working with Freedom on an investigation, Delta spokesman Anthony Black says.
"Delta supports a mother's right to breast-feed-slash-bottle-feed her babies on our aircraft," he says. Freedom spokesman Paul Skellon says breast-feeding on a plane is OK if it's done in a "discreet way."

Forty-three states have some form of legislation protecting a woman's right to breast-feed,
according to Mary Lofton, spokeswoman for La Leche League International,
a group that encourages breast-feeding. Lofton says the league has had a growing number of contacts from women who say they were harassed for breast-feeding on planes.

Sharon Panitch, 37, a massage therapist who organized the Burlington nurse-in,
says people who object are "hypocritical." "We just want to take care of our children," Panitch says.

Woman Accidentally Smothers Infant on Transatlantic Flight

British media sources report that late last month, a woman who fell asleep while breastfeeding her infant accidentally smothered her four-week old child while on a United Airlines flight.

United Airlines B777-222 wearing the Oscar's logo up front

United Airlines flight 982 was a 777 en route from Washington Dulles to Kuwait City, and somewhere over the Atlantic, she reportedly awoke to find that her child had been smothered. The crew was alerted by to the situation by the screams of the 29-year-old mother.

A doctor traveling on the flight treated the baby, and the aircraft diverted to London's Heathrow airport, landing on the morning of November 25th. The baby was transported to a local hospital, where she was pronounced dead on arrival.

An autopsy has been performed and the authorities are awaiting results. At present, the death is considered to be from unexplained causes, and police and the Child Abuse Investigation Team are investigating the circumstances of the death.

http://www.airsafenews.com/2009/12/woman-accidentally-smothers-infant-on.html