HURLBURT FIELD, Fla. —
“Is there a doctor on board?”
Sitting in his aisle seat toward the back of a commercial flight, Air Force Staff Sgt. William Flaspoehler saw the flight attendants scrambling for help.
It was May 2023, and Flaspoehler was traveling to a deployed location in Southeast Asia.
He walked to the front of the cabin and found a 64-year-old woman, pale-faced, sweating and clutching her chest in pain.
After observing her symptoms, he checked the woman’s pulse and blood pressure.
“We need to divert and land as soon as possible,” he told the pilots, knowing the woman would soon go into cardiac arrest.
From there, Flaspoehler said he relied on both instinct and experience. He followed chest pain protocols, placed the passenger on oxygen and gave her aspirin and fluids. Next, he examined a bottle of nitroglycerin: a drug that could potentially stabilize the patient, but could also be lethal.
“I knew I had to do it,” he said. “It was stressful, but I knew she didn’t have much time.”
As the aircraft began its descent to the nearest airport, Flaspoehler worked to keep the woman alive.
For Flaspoehler, an independent duty medical technician with the 23rd Special Tactics Squadron at Hurlburt Field, Florida, providing life-saving care is almost second nature.
His journey to that moment began years before he joined the military.
Before enlisting in the Air Force in 2016, Flaspoehler honed his medical skills as a civilian emergency medical technician in Los Angeles. Later, his career led him to a level-one pediatric trauma center at LA Children’s Hospital. There, he treated some of the most critically injured patients imaginable, he said.
“We responded to car accidents, fires, stabbings … pretty much everything imaginable,” he said. “As a whole, those jobs exposed me to a wide range of medical incidents.”
Flaspoehler said that one of those incidents in particular left him wanting something more in life.
One day, the former EMT found himself in the back of an ambulance, speeding through the streets of Los Angeles, treating a man bleeding heavily from a neck wound.
As he packed the wound to stem the bleeding, the same thought continued to flash through his mind: the injury was eerily similar to the one that had killed his friend, fallen Army Sgt. Michael Cable, who died in Afghanistan in 2013.
Flaspoehler said that in the moment, he tried not to think about Cable’s death. But afterward, he began to dwell on it. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he could be serving a greater purpose, he said.
“I wanted to be able to be there to see and treat my friends and brothers and sisters,” Flaspoehler said. “As a civilian, I was usually treating strangers. I wanted to be with a team and have the responsibility of taking care of them.”
That realization drove him to join the Air Force.
As part of the 23rd STS, Flaspoehler’s work is dynamic. His unit is tasked with missions involving austere airfield control, terminal attack control, personnel rescue and recovery, assault zone battlefield trauma care, and more.
In his role as an IDMT, he’s trained to establish medical treatment facilities in remote and hostile environments.
“I can run a 911 call, pick up an active duty patient, treat them as a paramedic, bring them to the emergency room and then treat them and discharge them,” Flaspoehler said. “This kind of position doesn’t really exist in the civilian world.”
He also provides medical support during high-risk activities like airborne jump operations and dives, and trains personnel on Tactical Combat Casualty Care to prepare them for potential life-and-death scenarios.
“One day, it could be their friend that needs help out there,” he said, referring to fallen Army Soldier Cable.
On the flight, the 64-year-old patient’s blood pressure and heart rate returned to healthier levels and the medicine reduced her pain.
Soon after, the flight landed in Kuching, Malaysia, where Flaspoehler helped first responders carry the woman off the plane and to an ambulance.
After arriving at his deployed location in Southeast Asia, Flaspoehler followed up on the patient’s status: the woman had survived after receiving additional care in Kuching.
“I felt relieved that I made the right call,” he said. “While it was something I had handled so many times before, I had never had to do something like this on a plane, in international waters.”
Ultimately, Flaspoehler said he credits the medical experience he gained as a civilian and in the Air Force.
“Knowing what to do and being ready can make all the difference.”
By SSgt Natalie Fiorilla
24th Special Operations Wing
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