An ordinary boarding call turned into a life-or-death situation on 13 October 2025, when a 71-year-old man lost consciousness in his seat moments before a Singapore Airlines flight was due to depart Barcelona for Singapore. By the time help reached him, he had no pulse and wasn't breathing. What happened over the next twenty minutes is why the story is worth knowing about — especially if you fly long-haul.
Chief stewardess Serene Koh, a 26-year veteran of the airline, was the first to reach the unresponsive passenger. She and leading steward Idris Abu moved him onto the cabin floor and started CPR, while inflight manager Kueh Joo Tong fetched the onboard defibrillator. The rest of the crew managed the cabin: reassuring the man's wife, keeping other passengers calm, screening the area for privacy — and crucially, putting out a call for medical professionals on board. Two doctors and two trained first-aiders came forward.
Serene and one of the doctors took turns on chest compressions. After two shocks from the AED and roughly twenty minutes of continuous effort, the man's pulse came back. He was later operated on in Barcelona to insert a stent in a blocked artery, spent a month recovering in the city, and eventually flew home to Sydney.
All five crew members — Koh, Abu, Kueh, leading stewardess Jolene Lim and flight stewardess Caitlyn Teng — were honoured at the Singapore Airlines CEO Service Excellence Awards in August 2026 for the rescue. For them, though, the framing was simple. As Kueh put it in an interview with Mothership: it was somebody's grandfather, somebody's father, and they were glad they could help.
Why should a traveller care? Beyond being a feel-good story, it's a useful window into what happens when things go wrong at 35,000 feet — or, in this case, before the wheels even leave the ground. Cabin crew train regularly for medical emergencies, aircraft carry defibrillators and emergency medical kits, and crews are taught to locate medically trained passengers fast. The practical takeaways from the crew themselves: if something feels wrong, alert the crew immediately; stay calm and give responders room to work; and if you have medical training, identify yourself early. On a full A350 with hundreds of passengers, the odds are good that a doctor or nurse is already on board — the crew just need to find them.
