I know that on most Domestic US flights, doctors, nurses, and paramedics are not permitted to open the medical bag unless their identity (and license) are confirmed by a flight medical group, and even at that, in situations where there is no doctor on the flight (but a paramedic or RN is), they will act upon the authority of a ground based doctor who approves all medication use.
In 2004, I was on a flight from CMH -> SJC and there was a medical emergency. At the time, I was a licensed paramedic, and pressed my call button when there was a page for 'medical personnel on the flight' after some delay when nobody else pressed their button. A flight attendant came up, asked me what my training was, and went to the front to call somewhere. A few minutes later, she brought a bag and took me to the back galley and handed me an airphone with a doctor on the other end, who confirmed with me the proper dosing and timing of ACLS drugs as we worked together to stabilize a patient. The process itself was like riding around with a doctor in the back of an ambulance -- he was very methodical about asking questions and quickly approved medication within reason at my discretion.
Ultimately, the flight was diverted, the patient was (very quickly) offboarded from the back galley and after some fuel for the plane, we were back on our way to SJC.
US Airways gave me a fair amount of miles (50K? 100K? I don't remember the exact number), upgraded the rest of my flight to first class, and provided me Platinum status for the rest of the year, along with a few other trinkets/swag pieces.
Not always imo. A British doctor was able to provide care on. Jetblue flight when no one else was available. Of course they can't check British Medical registration but they were happy nonetheless to allow care to be provided as no one else was available. No pharmaceuticals were given of course however.
Certainly great customer service, but also a very good business decision by the airline. With an average cost of $100k per diversion, 54 diversions cost Lufthansa ~$5.4m annually.
With a conservative 40% of urgent cases being treatable under the Doctors on Board program, that's a $2.16m saving.
Cost of such a program is next to negligible - airlines spend hundreds of $ per flyer per year marketing in various ways to frequent flyers. A €50 discount voucher per flyer certainly won't break the bank.
My friends family got stuck with a very sick child on the other side of the world and needed to go home. They managed to raise the funds needed amoung friends and family and used this plane conversion to get safely home. Im very grateful this can be done and I don't want to think about what could have happened if it didn't.
Interesting. I was on a Lufthansa flight last week and they had a call asking for a doctor/emt/paramedic on the PA, however the flight was not diverted. I'm not sure what happened. This was on an 11 hour SFO-FRA flight.
Same thing happened to me (LH 0455 25 DEC) -- maybe we were on the same flight?
It was an older passenger about 5 seats across from me in Premium Economy. He looked to be having some kind of illness, age, or pre existing condition difficulty, not anything I could deal with (I know trauma care reasonably well from SF medics and working in a hospital, and some dive medicine stuff, but do t have any certification beyond first responder stuff), so I didn't do anything.
I was fairly surprised there were no medical people on the flight. I did notice some of the flight crew checking in on him periodically, and he seemed to de-plane normally, wasn't met with an ambulance, etc.
They should also start caring about their basic comfort. I am 1.90 and had to take 12 hour flight with them. The seats were so close to each other so I could barely walk after the flight after we landed. I believe adding more and more rows of seats is really absurd.
Everyone says this, and yet everyone buys the cheapest ticket at the most convenient time. If consumers cared enough to pay more for better seats, they would have paid extra for the airlines with better seats. They didn't.
I think a big part of the problem is that it's not obvious which airlines have better seats. If I run a search on Kayak (or similar) I can easily find the right combination of price and time that I need. But short of selecting a higher class it's not clear which of the airlines will have wider seats or more legroom. There is no way to sort by these criteria. Sure, you could do some research to figure this out, but most people won't have the time or knowledge to do that.
If anyone does build a airline shopping site that does offer the ability to compare flights based on comfort I will gladly start using it exclusively.
In the US, all three of the major carriers have some type of extra-legroom economy-class seat, and all three charge extra to book into it (though if you have frequent-flyer status with the airline you can often get it at reduced price or free).
The only tricky bit to this is that thanks to mergers from airlines which didn't have this, and the time needed to roll out fleet-wide cabin refurbs, there are still planes flying for those airlines which don't have the dedicated extra-legroom sections (and the tiny regional jets simply don't get those most of the time).
When in doubt, swing over to the website of the actual airline, enter the date/destination, and in the list of flights you can click to pull up a seat map which will show you whether that section exists and if so which seats are in it (American calls it "Main Cabin Extra", Delta calls it "Comfort+" and United calls it "Economy Plus").
Seat width is not really something US airlines differentiate on very much. Some have wider seats in the international version of their extra-legroom economy (typically only one inch wider), but for the most part if you want a wider seat you need to buy a first-class or business-class ticket.
Spot-checking on some routes I do regularly, middle-tier seating is almost always a 2-3x multiple of a regular seat, while only offering ~20% more room.
Probably 1/3 of the time I travel from YVR I am put on a plane with a different tail than the airline I booked through. I pay for "Air Canada to SFO" but end up getting a United flight. So I've given up trying to figure out exactly which airline I am flying with.
(I actually really really hate air canada for this. I keep forgetting that I need to go to the united checkin at SFO, not the Air Canada desk which is 11 billion footsteps away at the other end of everything.)
Admittedly I haven't flown United in a couple of years, but my experience with them was the same as with every other airline: when booked on a codeshare (i.e., Airline A issues the ticket, but Airline B operates the flight), the itinerary emailed to me would always say "Check in at the (insert operating airline) ticket counter".
At least on the case of Air Canada and United, that's code-share flights. If you book via the Air Canada website it's very very obvious whether you're taking a real AC plane or not, but third party booking sites tend to hide that.
In case it helps, the United code-share flights are numbered AC[345]\d\d\d.
The information is there, although in different placed depending on which website is used. I just have to remember to check the fine print, at least when I am the person actually booking the ticket. When i'm not, then I have to check the boarding docs for the little "operated by" tag. The whole scheme is not something you expect from a supposedly national airline like AC.
Are these codesharing flights? I'm usually picky about choosing the exact right flights that are actually operated by the airline of my choice so that I get what I want.
At least the last time I flew with them, JetBlue had wider seats and more legroom than any other airline I've recently flown on... but the seats had this incredibly uncomfortable lumbar support that felt like a huge wedge poking into my lower back.
JetBlue has the only economy seats of the US and EU carriers that I can tolerate. Every other carrier that I've flown, I have to upgrade to at least premium economy to get a decent seat.
Seatguru and most flight searches will show you the info, but you do need to pay for more comfortable seats generally. Even on JetBlue, I buy the "Even More Space" seats when available.
Kayak shows seat pitch for many flights — at least those where the equipment is known — if you expand the fare to see the details. It's right down there with the icons indicating whether the fare has wifi or seat power and stuff.
Both British Airways and Emirates A380s are ten-abreast in economy. But BA's seats are narrower, being the same physical seat as they use in their 787s, resulting in uselessly wide aisles in the A380.
I always felt that it's mind-bogglingly amazing that technology exists to let me cross continents in mere hours at an affordable price. Therefore I never minded any sort of discomfort caused by crammed seats and will happily pay the lowest possible price for the flight.
This would probably change if I flew with any frequency though.
For European business class short haul flights, it won't help. BA refitted their A319/A320/A321s some time around July 2014, which included reducing business pitch from 34" to 30". Lufthansa is the same [1][2][3]
EasyJet and other LCCs actually have a better proposition for leg room now, as you can pay for and select an extra leg-room seat at time of purchase.
(EDIT: pre-empting "there's no need for leg room on short flights", I'm talking about flights of up to ~5 hours)
No the shouldn't. For most of us economy seats work quite fine. I'm 1.89 and regularly have 12+ hour flights with Lufthansa. I prefer cheaper tickets to a little bit more legroom that I don't really need. And if those seats wouldn't be sufficient, I'd just buy Economy Plus tickets instead of complaining about economy tickets.
To quote the great: "you are in a seat, in the air, flying 1000km/h... it's a miracle". Without the planes, it would take 2 weeks to cross Atlantic. So love it already ;-)
I know that on most Domestic US flights, doctors, nurses, and paramedics are not permitted to open the medical bag unless their identity (and license) are confirmed by a flight medical group, and even at that, in situations where there is no doctor on the flight (but a paramedic or RN is), they will act upon the authority of a ground based doctor who approves all medication use.
In 2004, I was on a flight from CMH -> SJC and there was a medical emergency. At the time, I was a licensed paramedic, and pressed my call button when there was a page for 'medical personnel on the flight' after some delay when nobody else pressed their button. A flight attendant came up, asked me what my training was, and went to the front to call somewhere. A few minutes later, she brought a bag and took me to the back galley and handed me an airphone with a doctor on the other end, who confirmed with me the proper dosing and timing of ACLS drugs as we worked together to stabilize a patient. The process itself was like riding around with a doctor in the back of an ambulance -- he was very methodical about asking questions and quickly approved medication within reason at my discretion.
Ultimately, the flight was diverted, the patient was (very quickly) offboarded from the back galley and after some fuel for the plane, we were back on our way to SJC.
US Airways gave me a fair amount of miles (50K? 100K? I don't remember the exact number), upgraded the rest of my flight to first class, and provided me Platinum status for the rest of the year, along with a few other trinkets/swag pieces.