Woman Gives Birth On Board Etihad Flight, Airline Diverts Aircraft

An Etihad Airways flight was diverted to an airport in Mumbai, India, on Wednesday morning after a woman gave birth on board, reports said.

Flight EY 474 was diverted to Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport. The aircraft was on a journey from Abu Dhabi to Jakarta, Indonesia, when the emergency situation happened. It landed in Mumbai at around 2 a.m. UTC Wednesday (10 p.m. EDT Tuesday), AirNav RadarBox, a flight tracking website, showed.

The woman was rushed out and taken to East's Seven Hills Hospital in Andheri, Mumbai, where she was admitted. According to a report in local daily Mumbai Mirror, the woman passenger is an Indonesian national.

"She was taken to the operation theatre on arrival at the hospital and is now recuperating in the women's ward," a hospital official told the news outlet.

Other details regarding the woman or the incident were not available at the time of the report. The flight resumed its journey soon. It was delayed by 1 hour and 55 minutes, according to the flight tracking website.

Etihad Airways, one of the largest airlines of the United Arab Emirates, has its head office is in Khalifa City, Abu Dhabi, and it commenced operations in 2003. It has a fleet of 116 Airbus and Boeing aircrafts. In 2017, the total revenue of the airline was put at $6.1 billion, according to the company website.

“This was a pivotal year in Etihad’s transformation journey. The Board, [the] new executive leadership team and all our employees worked extremely hard to navigate the challenges we faced. We made significant progress in driving improved performance and we are on track in 2018,” H.E. Mohamed Mubarak Fadhel Al Mazrouei, chairman of the board of Etihad Aviation Group, said at the time.

In a similar incident, a woman gave birth during a flight journey from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to Atlantic City, New Jersey, in May this year. The unidentified woman gave birth during the final phase of a Spirit Airlines flight to Atlantic City International Airport, the airlines' media relations manager, Derek Dombrowski, said.

“We are incredibly proud of our crew’s response, and we wish the family the very best with their new addition,” Dombrowski said adding that the woman asked for privacy while she and the baby recovered. “While very rare, our crew is trained to assist in the unlikely event a guest goes into labor.”

The New Jersey state police confirmed that Emergency Medical Services (EMS) transported the mother and the child to AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center’s Mainland campus in Galloway Township.