This story about a woman who recently gave birth on a trans-Atlantic flight piqued our curiosity, and specifically the fact that the flight crew was able to locate 2 doctors on the plane to assist with the delivery. My wife observed that, in many of the news stories and personal anecdotes she’s heard about in-flight medical emergencies, there’s almost a doctor on board who’s able to help with the emergency. This raised the question: how likely is it that a medical doctor will be a passenger on any given commercial airline flight? Is it a virtual certainty that a doctor will be aboard, or just good luck when it happens?
According to one source, there are 744,000 practicing doctors in the U.S., which represents about a quarter of a percent of the general population. But the more pertinent statistic would be what proportion of the population of commercial airline passengers is doctors. As a group, doctors are much more affluent and, one would imagine, fly much more frequently than members of the general population, but by what amount? Do they fly 10 times more frequently? More? If the average doctor flies 10 times more frequently than the average American, then it’d seem that about 2.5% of airline passengers would be doctors, meaning 1 of every 40, which would suggest that the probability of a doctor being aboard any given airline flight would be pretty strong.
Any thoughts?