Two people were discovered dead in the wheel well compartment of a JetBlue Airways plane that landed in Florida Monday night, the airline has confirmed.
JetBlue issued a statement Tuesday morning saying the bodies were found in an aircraft’s landing gear compartment at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport during a routine inspection after the plane had landed.
“The circumstances surrounding how they accessed the aircraft remain under investigation,” JetBlue said, as reported by CBS News. “This is a heartbreaking situation, and we are committed to working closely with authorities to support their efforts to understand how this occurred.”
The airline confirmed the aircraft had most recently operated as Flight 1801 from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. It flew to Fort Lauderdale and landed around 11:10 p.m. local time Monday.
According to data from FlightAware, the Airbus A320 was in operation for most of the day Monday, departing Kingston, Jamaica in the early morning hours for New York, before flying to Salt Lake City later that morning and eventually heading back to New York.
CNN notes the incident was alerted on the Broward County Sheriff’s Office radio shortly after the bodies were found.
“A gate technician in the landing gear area noticed two males who appear to be Signal 7, advised they are not moving in the landing gear area,” an unidentified person said, using the law enforcement code for a deceased person.
It’s the second such incident in recent weeks, after a dead body was found in a wheel well of a United Airlines plane in Hawaii on Christmas Eve after it flew from Chicago. The airline said it was unsure how the person had climbed into the compartment, which is only accessible from outside the aircraft.
A 2011 Federal Aviation Administration study found that approximately 80 per cent of people who stow away in plane wheel wells or other external compartments die due to low oxygen levels and freezing temperatures at high altitudes.
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