A Moroccon female gave birth to a baby when Turkish flight was flying high in skies. The flight was on it mid-way way from Istanbul to Chicago this week when woman gave birth to a baby with the help of the cabin crew and a doctor who happened to be on board in the Turkish flight. When the plane landed at Chicago airport, a medical team was already waiting to welcome newborn baby, named Mehdi.
The woman, originally from Morocco and traveling with her husband on a Turkish Airlines flight on Sept. 27, gave birth to baby two weeks before her due date when her water broke at 30,000 feet, the airline shared with Travel + Leisure. That’s when the cabin crew took to the loudspeaker asking if there were any doctors on board.
By a stroke of luck, Dr. Feridun Kubilay was on the plane after having decided to delay his flight back to the United States by a week. Dr Kubilay — a permanent U.S. resident who works part-time as a neurosurgeon in Turkey, but doesn’t practice medicine in his hometown of New Orleans — quickly jumped into action.
It had been decades since he had managed delivery of a baby, but he was ready to support the lady.
Courtesy of Turkish Airlines
When the plane arrived in Chicago, a medical team was waiting for them, Turkish Airlines said. The baby boy was named Mehdi.
When a woman gives birth mid-air, the baby’s citizenship can depend on a number of factors. If the baby is born over the ocean, the child could become a citizen of the country where the plane is registered in some cases. And some countries, including the U.S., grant citizenship to a baby if it is born over that nation’s land.
This isn’t the first time a woman has given birth on a plane. Earlier this year, a woman gave birth after going into preterm labor on a flight from Utah to Hawaii with the help of three NICU nurses who happened to be on board.
In October 2020, a woman in India gave birth to a baby boy on a flight from Delhi to Bangalore, and in November 2019, a woman gave birth on an American Airlines flight from Florida to North Carolina.
In February 2019, JetBlue named one of its planes in honor of a baby boy who was born on a flight heading from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
