Frontier sued over air cardiac death
October 23, 2001
Greg Griffin, Denver Post Business Writer
The Denver Post, Section BIZ, Edition TUE1, Page C-03

A Massachusetts woman is suing Frontier Airlines for not having a defibrillator aboard its airplane when her husband went into cardiac arrest and died in July 2000.

Brett Stone, a 28-year-old venture capitalist, had a heart attack on July 27 aboard Frontier flight 419 from Boston to Denver. Though two passengers - a physician and a medical technician - tried to save Stone, he died before the plane landed. The suit says he had no known history of heart problems.
Christine Stone, of Middlesex County, Mass., claims Frontier was negligent because most major airlines and some smaller carriers had deployed on-board defibrillators at that time. She is seeking a wrongful-death verdict and $20 million.

"Had the emergency medical kit on Flight 419 been equipped with an AED (automatic external defibrillator), the physician, the medical technician or a trained flight attendant would have saved Mr. Stone's life," Christine Stone claims in the suit, filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts.
A spokeswoman for Frontier said Monday she could not comment on the litigation. At the time of Brett Stone's death, airlines were not required to have the devices on board.

Frontier equipped all of its planes with defibrillators in January, and the Federal Aviation Administration required all airlines to install them within three years.

Stone claims, however, that due to widespread media coverage, Frontier was well aware of the benefits of onboard defibrillators in July 2000 but was too cheap to buy them. United Airlines, its main competitor in Denver, finished installing defibrillators aboard all its aircraft earlier this year.
Defibrillators are used during heart attacks to provide electrical shocks that stimulate the heart to resume normal beating. The automated external defibrillator used by airlines is the size of a small tote bag and costs about $3,500; it can be operated with minimal training.
It is considered one of the best ways to handle the most common type of heart-stopping arrhythmia: ventricular fibrillation. But if the defibrillator isn't used within about 10 minutes of the ventricular fibrillation, death is likely.

American Airlines, the first U.S. carrier to begin installing defibrillators in the mid-1990s, said earlier this year that the devices had saved 12 passengers aboard its planes.