A man died at one of Milan’s main airports Tuesday after being sucked into a jet engine on a taxiway, an airport spokesperson said.
The man was not a passenger nor did he work at Milan Bergamo Airport, Sacbo, the company that operates the airport, said in a statement. It was not immediately clear how the man gained access to the airport’s apron and then the taxiway, where he “approached a stationary commercial aircraft with engines running” and was killed, the statement said.
Flight operations at the airport were suspended at 10:20 a.m. local time because of “a problem” on the taxiway, the airport said in a statement and resumed at noon.
“Today’s tragic event has deeply shaken the entire airport community,” Giovanni Sanga, Sacbo’s president, said in the statement. “From the outset,” he added, “in addition to ensuring the immediate management of the emergency and assistance to passengers and crew, we have also focused our attention on the colleagues who witnessed the episode and were deeply affected by it.”
Sacbo did not identify the airline that was operating the plane involved in the episode. “The exact circumstances of the incident are under investigation by the judicial authorities, to whom Sacbo continues to provide full cooperation,” the statement said.
Nineteen flights at Milan Bergamo Airport were canceled and several were delayed, according to FlightAware, a company that tracks flight information. The airport is the third busiest in Italy after Fiumicino Airport in Rome and Malpensa Airport, which also serves Milan.
Airport tarmacs and taxiways usually have strict security protocols, and fatal accidents on them are rare.
Last May, an airport employee died after climbing into a running jet engine at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, in what Dutch military police called a suicide. A few months before that, a man who had passed through an emergency exit door died after climbing into a jet engine at Salt Lake City International Airport.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times
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