Originally Posted by
metallo
I wonder how much time elapsed from the moment of his arrest to paramedics making contact with him on the ground.
I can't imagine it was that quick, and in the meantime, the flight crew presumably kept doing CPR.
When I took my CPR refresher last year, we were read in on a recent case study: 2 EMT's were hiking, came across a man in cardiac arrest, they performed CPR for 72 minutes while another bystander hiked down and called for help. The victim survived w/o complications.
While this is certainly an extreme case, if you have well trained crew who know how to properly administer CPR (hard, fast, switch off to prevent fatigue), keeping the patient alive for the length of an expedited medical emergency descent is not out of the question. Additionally, most FA/CPR kits on planes have AED's now which significantly boost survival odds of a cardiac event.