Courtney Edwards, 34, a baggage handler at the Montgomery Regional Airport in Alabama, was killed in an unfortunate freak accident on New Year’s Eve. She was an employee of Piedmont Airlines, a subsidiary of American Airlines.
While working at the site of an airplane getting ready to leave the gate, the Edwards was somehow sucked into the plane’s working engine.
Operations at the airport stopped for several hours while the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration investigated the tragic incident. The full investigation is expected to take weeks.
The National Transportation Safety Board said in a statement that the “aircraft was parked at the gate with the parking brake set when a ground support personnel was ingested into the engine.”
The tragedy took place at around 3 pm in the afternoon on while flight AA3408 from Montgomery to Dallas/Fort Worth was at the gate. The plane was supposed to take off at 3:46 pm.
Montgomery Regional Airport management confirmed that the ramp worker was killed in what they called “an industrial accident.”
The flight was canceled after the accident, and the airport shut down for several hours, reopening and resuming operations at around 8:30 pm on Saturday night.