A female passenger reportedly gave birth moments after boarding an international flight from Turkey to France when she suddenly went into labor.
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The situation occurred on a Pegasus Airlines flight scheduled to fly from Istanbul to Marseille, France, as medics entered the aircraft and assisted the woman at the Sabiha Gökçen International Airport. Moments later, her child was born and the aftermath was recorded then uploaded online. According to the New York Post, the woman started experiencing extreme labor pains while the flight crew was preparing for takeoff.
Flight attendants provided first aid for the woman and moved her to the back of the aircraft before she gave birth. In a video clip, a female medic is seen swaddling the newborn, and reports say the baby was transported to a nearby ambulance for further evaluation.
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This is not the first time a baby has been born on an aircraft or during a flight. A woman gave birth on December 2022 during a flight from Ecuador to Spain and she didn’t know she was pregnant. The new mom, identified as Tamara, was a passenger on a KLM Royal Dutch flight when she started experiencing labor pains.
“A few hours before landing in the Netherlands, her stomach hurt and she decided to go to the toilet. To her great surprise, after two contractions, she suddenly had a baby in her hands,”
The baby was named Maximiliano in honor of the people who assisted her during labor and birth.
According to a 2017 study published in the journal “Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine,” the odds of a woman giving birth on a commercial flight are about 1 in 32,000. This is based on data from the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which tracks the number of in-flight births in the United States.
The study also found that most in-flight births occur in the third trimester of pregnancy, and that about half of all in-flight births are premature. However, the vast majority of in-flight births are successful, with both the mother and child surviving.
There are a few reasons why in-flight births are relatively rare. First, most airlines require pregnant women to be at least 32 weeks pregnant before they can fly. Second, many airlines have special procedures in place to assist pregnant women who go into labor in flight. Third, there are usually medical personnel on board commercial flights who can provide care to both the mother and child.