Two people were discovered dead in the wheel well compartment of a JetBlue Airways plane that landed in Florida Monday evening, the airline confirmed.
JetBlue released a statement Tuesday morning saying the bodies were found in the cargo hold of a plane’s landing gear at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport during a routine inspection after the plane landed. plane.
“The circumstances surrounding how they gained access to the aircraft are still under investigation,” JetBlue said, as reported by CBS News. “It’s a heartbreaking situationand we are committed to working closely with authorities to support their efforts to understand how this happened.
The airline confirmed that the plane had recently operated as Flight 1801 from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. He flew to Fort Lauderdale and landed around 11:10 p.m. local time on Monday.
According to data from Aware of theftThe Airbus A320 was in service for most of the day Monday, leaving Kingston, Jamaica, early in the morning for New York, before flying to Salt Lake City later in the morning and finally returning to New York. York.
CNN notes the the incident has been alerted on the Broward County Sheriff’s Office radio shortly after the bodies were discovered.
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“A door technician in the landing gear area noticed two men who appear to be from Signal 7 and indicated that they were not moving in the landing gear area,” said an unidentified person, using the law enforcement code for a deceased person.
This is the second incident of this type in recent weeks, after a A body was found in the wheel well of a United Airlines plane in Hawaii on Christmas Eve after his flight from Chicago. The airline said it did not know how the person got into the compartment, which is only accessible from outside the plane.
A 2011 Federal Aviation Administration study found that about 80 percent of people who travel stowaway in airplane wheel wells or other external compartments die because of low oxygen levels and freezing temperatures at high altitudes.
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