Man sucked into engine and killed while working on Boeing plane

A mechanic was sucked into the running engine of a Boeing jet and killed after forgetting a tool and going back for it.

Abolfazl Amiri was doing routine maintenance work on the 737-500 plane after passengers and crew had disembarked their flight from Tehran.

A safety area had been set up around the engine as required, but Amiri reportedly went back towards it to retrieve the tool on July 3.

The cover flaps had mistakenly not been closed, meaning he could be pulled into the running CFM56 engine which then caught fire, Bild newspaper said.

Firefighters were quickly on scene at Chabahar Konarak international airport in southern Iran and put out the blaze with water, but only the remains of Mr Amiri could be recovered.

The 26-year-old plane operated by domestic carrier Varesh Airlines was grounded for repairs, and an investigation into the accident was ordered by Iran’s aviation authority. 

Aviation safety information site JACDEC posted about the incident, saying: the engineer ‘died instantly’ while working on the right-hand-side engine.

There have been other incidents of airport workers being sucked into plane engines.

In May, a man was killed in the engine of a KLM Cityhopper Embraer at Schipol Airport in Amsterdam as it stood at the gate. This incident was found to be suicide after an investigation, as police said the man ‘intentionally climbed into the engine’.

Another fatal incident happened in 2023, when mother-of-three Courtney Edwards approached the running engines of a plane at Montgomery Regional Airport in the USA while working as a ground worker, and was pulled inside.

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