On Monday night, two dead bodies were found inside the landing gear of a JetBlue plane following a flight from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York to the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in Florida.
Employees discovered the dead bodies while conducting a routine post-flight maintenance inspection of the JetBlue Airbus A320 after Flight 1801 landed in South Florida at roughly 11 p.m. on Monday. The victims have not yet been identified by authorities, and an investigation into the incident is currently underway.
🚨🇺🇸 TWO BODIES FOUND IN JETBLUE LANDING GEAR: HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?!
Two people were found dead in the landing gear compartment of JetBlue flight 1801 during a routine maintenance check last night.
The flight had traveled from JFK to Fort Lauderdale, landing around 11 p.m.… pic.twitter.com/Z3TLFRVoAh
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) January 7, 2025
“The circumstances surrounding how they accessed the aircraft remain under investigation,” JetBlue explained in a statement, according to 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 plane left New York City at 8:20 p.m. and landed in Fort Lauderdale in less than three hours. However, that wasn’t the plane’s first flight of the day, as it began the day in Jamaica before flying to New York City the first time, then flying to Salt Lake City, then back to New York City before heading to Florida.
DEI Tragedy unfolds as two bodies were discovered in the landing gear of a JetBlue plane during a routine inspection.
pic.twitter.com/CDIZCdkgUC— MAGA Elvis 🇺🇸 (@BenStanton77) January 7, 2025
Homicide detectives with the Broward County, Florida, police department are currently investigating how the victims were able to access the landing gear.
This is not the first time that dead bodies were found in a plane’s landing gear in recent weeks, as another body was discovered in the wheel well of a United Airlines plane following a 9-hour flight. This body was found after the plane landed in Maui after leaving Chicago on Christmas Eve. Law enforcement is still investigating how this individual was able to access the tarmac and the wheel well of the plane.
Hiding in the landing gear of a plane is extremely dangerous, with nearly 80% of the roughly 130 people who have tried to do so since 1947 have died, according to data from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). There are a variety of reasons for this, including the danger of being crushed in the wheel well when the landing gear retracts — as the area is a tight compartment that is often smaller than the trunk of a car. Other dangers include the drop in oxygen levels at higher altitudes that can cause stowaways to lose consciousness, or the fact that temperatures in the compartment can drop to 75 degrees below zero, causing the stowaways to freeze to death.