A crying baby is an easy way to make a flight a lot longer than it needs to be. What we often don’t realize is that if it’s annoying to us, it’s annoying to the mother, just more so! For one woman, a crying baby wasn’t a problem when she got on the plane, but it was one when she got off!
Liliana Acevedo Castaneda had a flight from Mexico to Atlanta when something rather crazy happened.
Castaneda was traveling and was very pregnant. As any parent knows, however, kids don’t really care about your timeline – when they want something they let you know. For Castaneda, her little baby Analia wasn’t about to wait until her mom got home to enter the world, she was ready NOW.
While on the plane, Castaneda started having contractions.
“They checked me, they’re like, are you OK?’” mom Liliana Acevedo Castaneda recounted. “I said, ‘no I have really bad contractions.’”
She was about an hour into her flight from Mexico to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. As any mom knows, when things start happening, you don’t have much say on when or how!
When she realized what was happening, the flight was still a whole three and a half hours away from landing.
30,000 feet up in the air isn’t the best place to have a medical emergency, but they had to do something quick! A nurse on board ran over and tried to help. Bringing Castaneda to the back, the nurse gave her some oxygen and helped her breathe.
The goal wasn’t to deliver the baby on the plane, but to make it to the airport.
Since birth itself can have complications, they did their best to keep things from moving along while they were in the air. It was a race – baby against airplane!
Hoping to delay things, the nurse told Castaneda to NOT push in order to delay things.
“He was like don’t try to push because if you push more, the baby will come out,” Liliana said. “So I held the contractions for like three hours and 30 minutes on the way [to Hartsfield-Jackson.]”
All the while the pilots scrambled to have people ready to meet them at the airport. With a quick radio call, they talked to traffic control and told them what was happening. Soon, EMS was on the ground waiting for them to land.
In order to get to the ground faster, the pilots went WAY faster than they normally would!
“When we got to the gate, we noticed that the airplane was coming in exceedingly fast,” said firefighter Wanetta Nash, who helped deliver the baby. “Faster than normal.”
It wasn’t in vain, either! When they landed, the EMS team realized they had to deliver the baby right then and there – ON the plane. Rushing abroad, they took over and started getting things moving.
Soon, baby cries were heard from the back and the entire cabin started cheering!
“One of the flight attendants got on the microphone and she was able to say, ‘hey we have a baby girl!’” said Nash. “Everybody started clapping. I mean, the pilots were high-fiving. It was a very special occasion.”
The birth was successful and little Analia was welcomed into her new family. Aside from her being able to say she was born in Atlanta, the birth didn’t have any other complications!
Check out the video below!
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