OKLAHOMA CITY—The Frontier Airlines flight had been in the air only 15 minutes when Linda Upchurch looked over and saw her husband convulsing, before slipping into unconsciousness—his mouth open and his eyes in a fixed stare.
She summoned flight attendants, who quickly began resuscitation efforts, capped by the use of a defibrillator. Her husband’s heart started beating again.
She and her husband, Mike Upchurch, of tiny Lamar, Okla., about 90 mile southeast of Oklahoma City, were reunited Monday at Will Rogers International Airport with the airline crew and others who came to his aid last March after he suffered a heart attack while on a flight from Oklahoma City to Denver.
“What do you say to somebody who saved your life? Thank you is not enough,” Mike Upchurch, 55, said. “It was just God’s hand on me that put me in your hands.”
Upchurch was the first person saved on a Frontier flight using a defibrillator after the regional airline installed the devices on all planes in 2001, according to Frank Barr, director of in-flight training. The Federal Aviation Administration began requiring defibrillators on all flights in 2004.
“If he had been in his rural Oklahoma home, he wouldn’t have survived,” said Dr. Mary Ann Bauman, who was aboard the flight.
One of the flight attendants was Emmett Adams, a longtime paramedic.
Adams estimates it was “within four minutes” from the time fellow attendant Sylvia Price was summoned and the time Upchurch was revived after being taken to the back of the plane. Pilot Paul Francois brought the plane back to Oklahoma.
“I don’t remember anything about the flight until I came to in the ambulance on the way to the hospital,” Upchurch said.
A few days later, he underwent successful bypass surgery at Integris Baptist Medical Center in Oklahoma City.
Upchurch and his wife had been on their way to visit their son, Army Sgt. Patrick Upchurch, who had just returned from Iraq. Frontier flew Patrick Upchurch to Oklahoma City for Monday’s reunion.
According to the American Heart Association, if a defibrillator is placed on the chest of a cardiac arrest victim within three minutes of an attack, the victim has an 80 percent chance of survival. That chance drops 7 percent to 10 percent with each passing minute.
American Airlines, the country’s second-largest carrier, was the first airline to install defibrillators aboard all aircraft in 1997.
“I could comfortably say we’ve now had nearly 90 lives saved with defibrillators that have been on board all of our aircraft since 1997,” spokesman Tim Smith said Monday from the company’s headquarters in Fort Worth.
