The kind of trauma the new center is designed to treat is not related to any in-flight injuries or issues. It is to culturally and linguistically competently treat trauma, often multigenerational, caused by residential schools in the past two centuries.
Addiction treatment requires some specialized medical expertise but not anything likely to needed to treat an airline passenger or crew member.
My experience is commercial ships rather than planes. When a ship’s crew dies it can be a week or more before they reach port. So the deceased goes in the freezer. A smaller vessel probably doesn’t have more than one freezer.
Bon appetite.
On tonight’s episode of “Doctor Odyssey,” about a cruise line physician, a passenger died. Because the regular freezer was too full of food and contained, well, food, they instead put him in the florist shop’s cooler. Not the display cooler, the one in the back.
You’d be amazed by how few florist shops there are on the average tanker, bulker or container ship!
Good point. I imagine there isn’t a lot of demand for a florist’s shop on such vessels.
Iqaluit sounds like a designated emergency landing site that is unsuitable for the arrival of an actual airplane.
The only way this story makes sense is if the pilot was not only merely dead, but really most sincerely dead. There had to be closer airports where they could have landed. From Nunavut, I think even returning to Seattle would have been quicker than flying to New York. The only way Kennedy Airport makes sense is for the convenience of re-booking the passengers to Istanbul.
The article linked in the OP says the plane was an Airbus A320. That can’t be right, can it?
The conditions on board are inhuman, darling. Absolutely inhuman. It’s hideous I tell you - how’s a gal to decorate her cabin without fresh flowers? Honestly.
According to this site:
https://www.flightsfrom.com/SEA-IST
… the air distance from Seattle to Istanbul is 6090 miles (9799 km), and the flight time is 12 hours flat. I don’t know how that would translate to diverting to JFK, but looking at the great circle route map on that page, they were pretty far away from Iqualiut no matter what. They did not overfly Iqualuit, in other words. Yes, it was close, and would have been fine (I guess) if there were emergency mechanical problems with the aircraft, but if the pilot was obviously dead, then JFK may have been the better choice for rebooking passengers, moving luggage, etc.
Aside to @Princhester : Remind me not to take a drink of Coke when I read your messages. You nearly made me need a new monitor. At any rate, you made me laugh out loud. Thank you!
You guys cant reckon a business opportunity when it bites you in the a$$
As an anecdote: I once flew to Grand Cayman from Miami on Cayman Airways (I wonder if my Sir Turtle Rewards membership is still active…) On the way there, we were on a standard Cayman Airways plane. The trip back was on a chartered plane - they said it was one used by the Miami Dolphins. They also said that the trip back would take longer, because we were on a US plane and couldn’t go through Cuban air space.
In 1988, I flew Air New Zealand (when its airline code was still “TE” for “Trans-Empire”) from Honolulu to Auckland. The plane was branded “Cook Islands International” - a 747, and I sat in Economy in the upper deck. We didn’t land in the Cook Islands, and the airline only lasted from 1986 to 1992.
You can see the actual flight path of the flight here:
It looks like they were flying over the northern part of Baffin Island when they turned almost due south towards JFK. On that diversion route they passed within 300km/200mi of Iqaluit so I imagine they must have considered and rejected it.
From where they diverted, Winnipeg would have been closer even than Montreal, let alone New York.
A defibrillator works well if the problem is a fibrillating heart. It is useless against all the many other ways a heart can malfunction or simply give up the ghost, taking its host with it. Fibrillation is by far not the most common mechanism for sudden heart malfunction. But since it is the one we have a treatment device for, that’s the one mandated for airplanes and many other public spaces. It’s very much a matter of “can’t hurt; might help” thinking.
As to “a few minutes” …
Once the heart goes into fibrillation, effective blood pumping ceases. Irreversible brain damage starts about 2 minutes later and grows exponentially. You might get the heart going again after a “few” (5? 10?) minutes later, but the patient may well be pretty severely damaged. A lot of the motivation for people to have DNR (do not resuscitate) orders on file is that they’d rather be dead than severely brain damaged. And unlike on TV in most cases of hearts quitting, the response is much too little much too late to avoid significant disability for the survivor.
Iqaluit (and the other couple dozen similar facilities around the world) is/are completely suitable for their mission: a place to land to avoid crashing. It’s not a regular airline airport; it’s an emergency use airport, at least as to long-haul widebody jets. You go there when all the other alternative courses of action are worse. Everyone will survive going to Iqaluit, but everyone will be mightily inconvenienced and discomfited.
Once the guy is dead it make no sense to create a 2-day ordeal for all the passengers and crew (and airline) by choosing to land at Iqaluit for no sensible reason. So they didn’t.
You’re right it wasn’t an A320. Other news reports label it an A350 which is completely plausible.
Just an FQ nit…
That really describes ventricular fibrillation far better than it does atrial fibrillation:
So, they don’t put dead bodies in the overhead storage area?
“Thank you for flying Turkish Airlines… and is there a doctor on board? …And does anyone know how to fly a plane?”
(Obligatory “this is a diffferent type of flying altogether…” )
Maybe Herve VIllechaize or Verne Troyer. (sorry)
“Bawth, bawth, de plane, de plane…”
or maybe…
“Bobby, if you don’t stop kicked the seat back in front of you, we’ll have to put you in the overhead bin with the dead body…”
People already bitch about having to put their smaller bags under the seat in front of them.
Is it possible the pilots had to burn off fuel because the plane was so heavy? IIRC Airbus planes don’t have the same fuel dump capabilities that Boeing planes have.
Once the pilot was confirmed dead, there’s less than an hour flying to stop in JFK instead of Toronto (or Winnipeg?) and seriously minimize the customs and other formalities involved, since the plane departed from the USA. Plus, i bet a scramble to get a replacement pilot is a lot eeasier near JFK.
Do the various airlines allow pilots to fly for another airline like that in a pinch? How specific are the type requirements, will any old A350 certification do? OTOH, if anywhere is going to have a spare Turkish Airlines pilot, it would be JFK. I imagine if they grabbed someone currently on layover at JFK, they would already be sending a replacement for the replacement on the next plane out of Istanbul (not Constantinople…) if they have anything on the ball.