JetBlue Maintenance Workers Make Horrifying Discovery After Two Dead Bodies Found in Wheel Well of Plane at Fort Lauderdale Airport
- The plane had just arrived in Fort Lauderdale from New York but it had earlier flown back from Kingston, Jamaica, where there is a high risk of stowaway activity.
JetBlue maintenance workers at Fort Lauderdale Airport made a horrifying discovery late on Monday night after two dead bodies were found in the wheel well of an Airbus A320 that had just arrived in Florida following a three-hour flight from New York.
In a statement, a spokesperson for JetBlue said the bodies of the two stowaways were discovered during a routine post-flight maintenance inspection of the aircraft.
It remains unclear when the stowaways got in the landing gear of the 18-year-old airplane. Although there is a slight possibility the deceased men breached security in New York, the plane had earlier flown back from a destination with a much higher risk of stowaways.
According to data provided by Flight Radar 24, the aircraft had been on the ground in Kingston, Jamaica, for around an hour and a half on Sunday night before it flew back to New York JFK, arriving in the early hours of Monday morning.
From there, however, the plane flew to Salt Lake City and back to New York JFK before continuing to Fort Lauderdale, where it was due to spend the night.
A spokesperson for the Broward County Sheriff’s Office said that autopsies were still to be performed to establish the causes of death of the two stowaways.
In most landing gear stowaway deaths, the victims die from a combination of hypoxia and hypothermia. In rare cases, victims have also fallen to their death as the landing gear has been lowered in preparation for landing.
In a statement, JetBlue confirmed the horrifying discovery, saying in a statement: “On Monday evening, January 6, at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, two individuals were found in the landing gear compartment of one of our aircraft during the routine post-flight maintenance inspection.”
“Tragically, both individuals were deceased. At this time, the identities of the individuals and the circumstances surrounding how they accessed the aircraft remain under investigation.”
The statement added: “This is a heartbreaking situation, and we are committed to working closely with authorities to support their efforts to understand how this occurred.”
The JetBlue incident comes just two weeks after the body of a stowaway was found in the main landing gear of a United Airlines Boeing 787 Dreamliner that had just landed in Maui, Hawaii, following an eight-hour flight from Chicago.
Like the JetBlue plane, the United Airlines 787 had recently been in a destination with a high risk of stowaway activity, having just flown back from Sao Paulo, Brazil, a few hours before it departed for Hawaii.
In the 24 hours before the bodies of the JetBlue stowaways were discovered, the plane was flying at a cruising altitude of 36,000 feet, where the outside temperature would typically be around -58°F to -76°F.
