Pedestrian dies after being hit by Frontier Airlines taking off

A Fron­tier Air­lines plane hit and killed a pedes­tri­an on the run­way of the Den­ver In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port dur­ing take­off, air­port au­thor­i­ties said, spark­ing an en­gine fire and forc­ing pas­sen­gers to evac­u­ate.

The plane, on route from Den­ver to Los An­ge­les In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port, “re­port­ed strik­ing a pedes­tri­an dur­ing take­off at DEN at ap­prox­i­mate­ly 11:19 p.m. on Fri­day,” the air­port’s of­fi­cial X ac­count wrote.

A spokesper­son for the air­port said the pedes­tri­an, who jumped a perime­ter fence, has died. They said the uniden­ti­fied per­son was hit two min­utes af­ter en­ter­ing the air­port. The per­son is not be­lieved to be an air­port em­ploy­ee.

“We’re stop­ping on the run­way,” the pi­lot tells the con­trol tow­er, ac­cord­ing to the site ATC.com. “We just hit some­body. We have an en­gine fire.”

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ATC.com au­dio cap­tures the ex­change on the Den­ver run­way be­tween a Fron­tier pi­lot and air traf­fic con­trol.

The pi­lot tells the air traf­fic con­troller they have “231 souls” on board and that an “in­di­vid­ual was walk­ing across the run­way.”

The air traf­fic con­troller re­sponds that they are “rolling the trucks now” be­fore the pi­lot tells the tow­er they “have smoke in the air­craft. We are go­ing to evac­u­ate on the run­way.”

Fron­tier Air­lines said in a state­ment that flight 4345 was the one in­volved in the col­li­sion and that “smoke was re­port­ed in the cab­in and the pi­lots abort­ed take­off.” It was not clear whether the smoke was linked to the crash with the pedes­tri­an.

“The Air­bus A321 was car­ry­ing 224 pas­sen­gers and sev­en crew mem­bers,” the air­line said. “We are in­ves­ti­gat­ing this in­ci­dent and gath­er­ing more in­for­ma­tion in co­or­di­na­tion with the air­port and oth­er safe­ty au­thor­i­ties.”

Pas­sen­gers were then evac­u­at­ed via slides and the emer­gency crew bused them to the ter­mi­nal. The air­port spokesper­son said 12 pas­sen­gers suf­fered mi­nor in­juries and five were tak­en to lo­cal hos­pi­tals.

Den­ver Air­port said the Na­tion­al Trans­porta­tion Safe­ty Board had been no­ti­fied and that run­way 17L, where the in­ci­dent took place, will re­main closed while an in­ves­ti­ga­tion is con­duct­ed. It is ex­pect­ed to open lat­er to­day.

The pedes­tri­an death came a day af­ter a Delta Air Lines em­ploy­ee was killed while on the job at the Or­lan­do In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port. In a state­ment, the air­line said the em­ploy­ee was killed Thurs­day night with­out pro­vid­ing de­tails of the in­ci­dent nor the name of the em­ploy­ee.

“We are fo­cused on ex­tend­ing our full sup­port to fam­i­ly and tak­ing care of our Or­lan­do team dur­ing this dif­fi­cult time,” the air­line said. “We are work­ing with lo­cal au­thor­i­ties as a full in­ves­ti­ga­tion gets un­der­way to de­ter­mine what oc­curred.”

By THE AS­SO­CI­AT­ED PRESS

DEN­VER (AP)