Did you tell the cabin crew that while you weren’t a doctor, you were a qualified pilot? Just in case, you know.
ianad or an airplane
people can react to an event like a stress (seeing someone else’s blood is a common one) and their vagus nerve will lower blood pressure and cause fainting.
Heh, heh. As Richard Pearse said above, good thing it wasn’t the pilots.
Although I’m a pilot, most of my planes have the propellors on the outside of the engine. (as opposed to jets where the turbine blades are inside). I doubt if I’d have been much use.
FWIW: My trip back wasn’t *completely *uneventful, as I had a small 12V electrical failure, a growing fuel leak in one tank, and a failed transponder that prevented me from going into certain airports. (Customs also advised me not to fly near the Mexico border, as the intermittent xpdr would almost certainly get me introduced to their pilots) :rolleyes:
But nobody got sick. At least I can claim that.
In order of likelihood:
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One genuinely sick vomiter for whatever reason; the rest hysterical reactions. I put this first because of the “unconscious” bit, and the timing. What ya got here are fainters. There aren’t illnesses that make you unconscious en masse that do not make the news. Of course, some of the secondary vomiters might just be vomiting because vomit smells so bad. But not unconscious.
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A point exposure to an ingested enterotoxin that everyone consumed at the same time (“food poisoning” in layman’s terms). All the vomiters ate the same food in the terminal. Highly unlikely because the delay for this sort of food poisoning is typically at least 4 hours, even for staph, and the actual onset of vomiting varies by a few hours within a given exposure. So it’s not likely you account for the timing of exposure and then just by chance they all happen to vomit and faint at the same time.