The Region : Airliner Drops In to Drop Off New Baby

Dwayne Roy Lambert might have been born in Los Angeles if his mother hadn’t missed her original flight from Miami. Thirty minutes after boarding a later flight, Sharon Linton, 29, of Inglewood found herself in the throes of intense labor at 30,000 feet. The Eastern Airlines flight made an unscheduled landing at Houston Intercontinental Airport, and paramedics were barely out of the airport parking lot before Linton’s sixth child weighed in at 6 pounds, 2 ounces. “Paramedics kept telling me to hold on,” Linton said from a Houston maternity ward. “I kept telling them, ‘The baby’s coming! The baby’s coming!’ ” Her labor pains began as she boarded the flight, but she said she didn’t take them seriously. Half an hour later, a doctor aboard asked the pilot to land, and paramedics delivered the baby less than 10 minutes after Linton was placed in an ambulance.