An airport ground worker has been tragically killed in a bizarre accident at Helsinki-Vantaa Airport in Finland after they were crushed to death when they were trapped between a plane and a lavatory servicing vehicle.
The accident occurred early on Saturday morning during the turnaround process of Finnair flight AY62, which had just landed at around 4:21 am following a long overnight flight from Tokyo Haneda.
All the passengers had already disembarked the five-year-old Airbus A350-1000 featuring a special Moomin livery, and ground workers were busy preparing the aircraft for its next flight when a towing crew started to push the plane back from the gate so that it could be parked in a remote location.
What they didn’t realize, however, was that the lavatory waste truck was still parked underneath the aircraft, towards to the rear of the plane, and that the operator was actively servicing the lavatories when they started to push the plane back from the gate.
To service the lavatories, the operator uses mobile air stairs to connect a hose from the waste truck to a port in the underside of the aircraft fuselage.
When the plane was pushed back from the gate, it’s believed that the operator was crushed between the side of the aircraft and the waste truck. Police were called to reports of an incident at around 5:14 a.m. and have since opened a potential criminal investigation into the actions of the tow truck crew.
A spokesperson for Aviator Finland, a third-party ground handling company that employed the deceased workers, said that the company was holding special meetings with workers to discuss Saturday morning’s incident.
In early 2020, a Finnair flight attendant was seriously injured at Helsinki Airport after falling around 3.6 meters from the open door of an Airbus A320, which had just landed from a flight from Oulu.
An accident report into the accident revealed that on the morning of the incident, the aircraft had arrived at a remote stand, and passengers were deplaned via mobile airstairs into busses.
Due to a delay in the busses leaving the side of the plane, a flight attendant reopened a door at the back of the aircraft, stepped out onto the airstairs, and gave an ‘okay’ sign to the bus driver to indicate all the passengers had disembarked and that the bus could leave.
Just at the moment that the crew member went to stop back on the plane, the driver of the mobile airstairs started to drive away. The crew member slipped and plunged towards the freezing ground below.
The tow crew is supposed to do a walk around the aircraft to make sure there are no obstructions or aircraft damage that the crew could be blamed for at a later date. Many years ago at a west coast city in the United States, mechanics for United Airlines started to tow an aircraft from a remote location to a the terminal. Hard to believe that they did not see the food truck that was raised up to the rear galley door. When the mechanics pushed the aircraft back, the wing made contact with the food truck and almost tipped it over. True story. This is what happens when people take shortcuts and do not follow standard operating procedure.