The clip is now on the CBC website:

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2279748163601

Key points:

• Guy started complaining of chest pain 7 hours in to the 16-hour flight
• He lost control of his bowels and was vomiting
• There was no doctor on the plane
• AC contacted their 3rd party medical advisors and ultimately decided not to divert; doctors CBC talked to all said it sounded like a serious cardiac event, enough to divert
• The guy made it to YUL but died "shortly after" arriving - unclear whether it was minutes or days
• AC "categorically rejects" suggestions they did anything wrong, saying crew followed procedures

My observations - my wife is an emergency nurse who has assisted with multiple in-flight medical issues:

• It's surprising there was no doctor or nurse or EMT on board a 300-seat 789 - while the story only says there was no doctor on board, my experience is they will typically ask for nurses or EMTs if there's no doctor, and I'm assuming they did so here. Unfortunate for this fellow in the end
• The story points out that the pilots were the ones speaking to the medical service on the ground, but not speaking to the passenger. If there's a medical professional on board, that person would typically interface with the medical people on the ground. Given this was a 16-hour flight, I'm surprised that one of the pilots wouldn't have spoken to the pax - FA talks to pax, pax talks to pilot, pilot talks to ground seems like a potential game of telephone, so why not knock out one link in that chain? On a flight that long, shouldn't there be two relief pilots, such that one of the four could go back and talk to the pax while still keeping two on the flight deck?
• I was thinking about the timeline, wondering whether it might not have made sense to divert because of where they were and lack of better options, but even if it took a while after he first complained of chest pain to get an FA, contact the medical service on the ground, etc, they should still have been somewhere over Europe - it's not like they were over the mid-Atlantic and YUL was the closest or best option
• Although one thing that wasn't clear, and it's only a 3-minute clip so it's not very in-depth, is how long it took for his symptoms to worsen. We know that over the course of the flight, he had the chest pains, the vomiting, etc, but did he start with the chest pains at 7 hours and then not much else for a while, such that the seriousness may not have been apparent until it was too late? Did he maybe even start to feel better at some point before deteriorating again? Still, I could see YYR or UAK potentially not being suitable for a medical diversion, but KEF, YYT, YQB?

Mrs. Smith has gone to bed for the night, but I'll see what thoughts she has in the morning.

My thoughts on CBC's reporting:

• I know things have to be condensed for TV, but a 3-minute clip now passes for an "investigation"?
• Did CBC talk to anyone who knows anything about aviation?
• Did they ask anything like the questions I've pointed out above? If they didn't talk to anyone who know anything about aviation, I'd guess not. AC might have refused to provide some of that information, either because of the passenger's privacy or to not get themselves in to trouble with a lawsuit, but the story could have been much more informative if they had
• Bottom line is it seems like pretty shoddy journalism to me