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Passenger dies on AA flight

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Passenger dies on AA flight

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There's a 95 percent chance Senior Editor Christine Sarkis is thinking about travel right now. Follow her on Instagram @postcartography and Twitter @ChristineSarkis.

Christine Sarkis is an SATW-award-winning journalist and executive editor at SmarterTravel. Her stories have also appeared on USA Today, Conde Nast Traveler, Huffington Post, and Business Insider. Her advice has been featured in dozens of print and online publications including The New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, and People magazine. She has also shared travel tips on television and radio shows including Good Morning America, Marketplace, and Here & Now. Her work has been published in the anthologies Spain from a Backpack and The Best Women's Travel Writing 2008. She is currently working on a travel memoir.

The Handy Item I Always Pack: The Trtl Pillow. It's easy to pack and comfortable, and makes it so I can actually sleep on flights.

Ultimate Bucket List Experience: Seeing the Aurora Borealis from the comfort of somewhere warm, like a glass igloo or hot spring.

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Last Friday, American Airlines passenger Carine Desir died aboard a flight between Haiti and New York. Desir, who had heart disease and wasn’t feeling well when she boarded the flight, began to have trouble breathing and asked for oxygen before dying.

Accounts of what happened next diverge at this point. In its press release, American says there were 12 oxygen tanks onboard, and that each had been checked before take-off by flight attendants. But this ABC News story, which draws on the account of Desir’s cousin who was flying with her, paints a different picture, one in which the oxygen tanks were empty, the defibrillator broken, and the flight attendant initially unwilling to give Desir oxygen.

The thought of a medical emergency in the sky is scary enough, but the possibility that, in such an emergency, the standard medical tools passengers count on wouldn’t even function is profoundly unsettling. Meanwhile, American says it’s investigating.

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