Man Dies at Milan Airport After Being Sucked Into Jet Engine, Official Says

Europe|Man Dies at Milan Airport After Being Sucked Into Jet Engine, Official Says

A man died at one of Milan’s main airports on Tuesday after being sucked into a jet engine on the runway, an airport spokesman said.

The man was neither a passenger nor an airport employee, according to an official for Sacbo, the company that manages Milan Bergamo Airport. The official requested anonymity because he was not authorized to be quoted.

Flight operations at the airport were suspended at 10:20 a.m. local time because of “a problem” on the taxiway, Sacbo said in a statement, and resumed at noon.

The authorities were investigating the incident, the official said. He did not respond to questions about the airline the plane belonged to or how the man had accessed the runway.

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 Milan’s Malpensa Airport.

Airport tarmacs usually have strict security protocols, and fatal incidents on them are rare.

Last year, in May, an airport employee died after climbing into a running jet engine at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, in what the 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.