(Fort Lauderdale) Two bodies were found in the landing gear compartment of a JetBlue plane at a South Florida airport, authorities said.
Posted at 6:59 p.m.
Jeff Martin, Freida Frisaro and Julie Walker
Associated Press
The bodies were discovered in the wheel well area during a routine post-flight inspection Monday evening at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, the airline said in a statement to The Associated Press .
The plane had arrived in Fort Lauderdale shortly after 11 p.m. from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport.
“At this time, the identity of the individuals and the circumstances surrounding how they accessed the aircraft are still under investigation,” JetBlue’s statement said.
This is a heartbreaking situation, and we are committed to working closely with authorities to support their efforts to understand how this happened.
Excerpt from JetBlue press release
Paramedics pronounced both people dead at the scene, the Broward County Sheriff’s Office said Tuesday. The office’s homicide and crime scene units are investigating, he noted.
Both victims are believed to be men, Carey Codd, spokesperson for the Broward County Sheriff’s Office, told the AP.
“Beyond that, their identities are unknown at this point, and that’s one of the pieces of information that Broward Sheriff’s Office detectives are trying to sort out at this point,” he explained.
Investigators will investigate and research all aspects of this particular incident, trying to determine where the flight came from, where it was located and under what circumstances the individuals boarded the plane.
Carey Codd, spokesperson for the Broward County Sheriff’s Office
Although its most recent flight was from New York to Fort Lauderdale, the plane had landed in Kingston, Jamaica, and Salt Lake City, Utah, earlier Monday, according to flight tracking service FlightAware.com . Authorities have not said where they believe the people entered the wheel well.
Autopsies are planned for both bodies to determine how they died.
There appeared to be “no involvement of the flight crew or aircraft operations,” the National Transportation Safety Board, which is responsible for investigating air accidents, said in a statement Tuesday Morning. The agency did not investigate, she said.
This is the second time in the past month that a body has been found in the wheel well of a plane. At the end of December, a body was found in the wheel well of a United Airlines plane after it landed on Maui from Chicago.
In recent months, the airline sector has also had to deal with ticketless passengers found in cabins.
In November, a Russian national who did not have a ticket boarded a Delta Air Lines flight to Paris in New York and was arrested when the plane landed in France. She had managed to bypass security to board, authorities said.
Then, on Christmas Eve, a passenger without a ticket boarded a Delta Air Lines flight from Seattle to Honolulu. The passenger was discovered while the plane was taxiing for departure, Delta said at the time.
