Woman gives birth on a Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul to Chicago

CHICAGO: A woman gave birth to a healthy baby boy mid-flight on her way from Istanbul to Chicago this week with the help of the cabin crew and a doctor who happened to be on board. The woman, originally from Morocco and traveling with her husband on a Turkish Airlines flight on Sept. 27, was 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, Nola.com reported. 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 delivered a baby, but he was ready. "I was so happy everything was OK," Kubilay told Nola.com. When the plane arrived in Chicago, a medical team was waiting for them, Turkish Airlines told T+L. 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