Texas airport worker dies after being sucked into Delta jet engine | Hacker News Reader

Texas airport worker dies after being sucked into Delta jet engine

theguardian.com

25 pointsmarban46 comments

Tangentially, from a U.S. Navy incident: "An intake on the A-6 Intruder isn't very big. As Bridges was sucked in, he was able to stretch out his arm and wedge himself on the bullet of the blades and the wall of the intake, holding himself just inches from certain death as the engine fully shut down.

"Bridges was helped down by his fellow flight deck sailors when it was safe to help him. He walked away from the incident with a broken collarbone, a blown eardrum and some cuts and scrapes. One sailor who was aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt at the time said Bridges did not return to the flight deck for some time."

https://www.businessinsider.com/us-sailor-survived-being-suc...

We had a crew chief ingested & killed by his F-16 at my base. He ducked under the nose rather than walk around the front of the aircraft (like he was trained to do) and the airflow caught his field jacket and pulled him in.

They are required to check the intake as part of the pre-flight inspection, and the bar down the middle will not save you. (image below is safe for viewing)

https://www.dvidshub.net/image/3143219/149th-amxs-maintains-...

Sometimes you read stuff on the internet about lockouts. Some people even say to do a lockout when you do an oil change, avoiding that you forget to put in new oil.

Whether this is needed or not is debatable, but the consequences are, depending on the car, the cost of a new engine + labor.

I hope for this guy down there that there are multiple lockouts out there to ensure he's out there.

Would multiple bars meaningfully degrade the performance of the jet?

> Officials added that the worker – whose identity has not been publicly released – was ingested into the one engine which the plane in question had on at the time.

...

> But the cause of worker’s death hadn’t officially been determined

Wait... what?

Unlikely but possible: worker dies of a brain aneurysm, hasn’t fallen down yet. Gets sucked in. Sure it isn’t likely, but it is POSSIBLE.

Best of luck to the poor coroner.

The official cause of death can legally only be determined by an investigation, which hadn't yet been concluded by the time the article was published. I'm willing to bet they'll conclude it was "ingestion by jet engine" though.

That's not a cause of death - a cause of death is something like "blunt force trauma", or in the case that the engine compressor blade sliced off an artery, "blood loss".

Your description makes me think you underestimate how comprehensive death-by-engine-turbine is.

"Pulped"

Maybe you would know, is this basically instantaneous (I hope), sort of like the submersible implosion? The frequency of these unimaginable tragedies is actually painful to keep hearing about

I'm not an expert but yeah I'm pretty sure it would take a fraction of a second.

I was just pondering the previous case of this, and thinking that I do not envy the tasks faced by the repair techs and coroner who will need to pick apart the engine and body parts that are sort of entirely ... mingled at this point.

there is an ICD-10-CM medical diagnosis code for this: V97.33 Sucked into jet engine

I stand corrected... WTF

Surprisingly, there is an ICD-10-CM medical diagnosis code for this: V97.33 Sucked into jet engine

I thought this was in jest, but wow - you're not kidding. There it is.

Wow, it is: https://www.icd10data.com/ICD10CM/Codes/V00-Y99/V95-V97/V97-

> V97.33 should not be used for reimbursement purposes as there are multiple codes below it that contain a greater level of detail.

> V97.33XD …… subsequent encounter

Who has a subsequent encounter with a jet engine?

What's the health insurance reimbursement rate for getting sucked into a jet engine a second time? I'm curious why it was only added in 2016.

Though quite hilarious, that suffix applies to any code.

I'm guessing there was a computer system that was logging causes of death by ICD and they ended up with a number of cases that had no code for it and this and a few others were submitted.

https://www.businessinsider.com/us-sailor-survived-being-suc...

That video has been around the internet a few times. And while it might feel like watching someone die, as the headline says, the crewman survived without major injuries.

> Surprisingly, there is an ICD-10-CM medical diagnosis code for this: V97.33 Sucked into jet engine

Don't they have code for literally everything imaginable? IIRC, they have separate codes for particular animals biting particular digits (e.g. snakebite, right thumb; dog bite left pinky).

In these kinds of incidents, the steps that led to the final outcome are more causes than the actual ingestion. Why was the engine on? Did it need to be on? Why was the worker anywhere near a running engine?

I'm guessing we'll find out it was very similar to the other recent death due to this. Staff is being pushed to go as fast as possible and being punished for not going fast enough, then the carrier says "we told them to follow safety protocols, it's not our fault"

Maybe the cause of death will be qualified as "suicide".

That's a matter of culpability. There's still a chance they can blame the dead guy for his own death.

And depending on the situation, they may be right to. My friend does workplace safety at various facilities, and the amount of people who skirt basic safety principles like using hand rails and paying attention near machinery is astonishing. One even broke their legs falling down stairs because they refused to use the handrails, then attempted to sue the construction company for damages. Needless to say they got told to fuck off.

At a certain point, the safety personnel can only watch in horror as basic OSHA guidelines are ignored at every step. Of course it may be a case that the safety personnel were incompetent and not training employees, but I say its a 50/50 whether it was their fault or not.

I wouldn't consider that "needless to say", most adults don't rely on a handrail to descend stairs. I would guess in this case "refused" to use a handrail would require an enormous amount of proof, and the stairs themself, why were they so dangerous that using a handrail is the only way to use them safely? Maybe, at the very least, they could have been padded, or had a landing halfway down, etc.

> most adults don't rely on a handrail to descend stairs.

And that is inherently unsafe. You take that risk, and it is your fault alone if you are injured because of it.

> enormous amount of proof

This was a work site, there are cameras everywhere. If the CCTV shows you running down the stairs without use of the hand rail and falling, that is more than sufficient evidence that you broke your own legs.

> why were [stairs] so dangerous

They’re fucking stairs. No amount of padding or landings can successfully mitigate falling in a way that breaks your body. And both come with large downsides. The best I have ever heard for padding is carpet, which requires regular deep cleans and can become smoothed over time, increasing the likelihood of a fall. And landings require far more space than one might think, and only help so much.

The stairs were OSHA compliant and fully safe if one takes them properly. The problem was that individual decided they were above safety and permanently damaged their body as a result.

Take it easy, bro... nobody said you were wrong, just that it isn't a certainty that the person was in the wrong based on your very limited initial description. This was your friend's story, right? Are you sure you know ALL the details and not just the company's side? Were there extenuating circumstances -- any liquids nearby, were all workers provided proper footwear?

You didn't say he was running (however, why was he running? did a manager tell him he needed to hurry, did he not have enough time for a bathroom break? etc) and stairs come in all shapes, sizes, steepness, lengths, materials, and hardness of the floors under them. Nothing can 100% prevent injuries, but you can try to avoid the worst scenario. It's a factory, I get it, maybe it's not possible, but I would want to know if there had been any prior similar incidents. In any case, no matters whose fault, it still doesn't seem necessary to tell the guy to "fuck off."

We're not looking to try the case, just pointing out that it's pretty ridiculous to immediately claim a workplace incident is entirely the worker's fault.

>The company also made it a point to say that its initial investigation had shown the worker’s death was “unrelated to Unifi’s operational processes, safety procedures and policies”

Looks like CYA Mode to me. If this is an accident, then their safety procedures need changing.

Unless the worker was not complying with precesses, procedures, or policies.

They did this with the truck driver with that 95 explosion outside Philadelphia the other week. My dad's a truck driver so I was trying to find out what happened to this man. For several days, the mayor was saying that there were no deaths as of yet reported, but nobody will talk about what happened to the driver. Eventually they announced his death after having an investigation and alerting the family.

This keeps happening, at a rate of several per year. Clearly the error margin isn't large enough. I suggest maybe employees should be strapped in to heavy forklifts at all times when near planes.

the worker had “intentionally stepped in front of the live engine” on the jet.

It doesnt sound like this is a worker safety issue

The employer would surely love that to avoid liability.

It could also just be true. Im not sure why you'd start making assumptions without reasons for doing so

You're right, these cases could all be suicides. But somehow I doubt it.

I don’t know... Being restricted by some sort of restraint system could mean the result is only partial ingestion.

Partial ingestion seems worse than full ingestion

Depends on which part goes in first.

It could also result in many fewer ingestions overall.

I was interested in understanding the magnitude of the force exerted by the air intake. In my brief search, I found an article that referenced ~14 feet as the safe upstream distance for the engine on a 737.

The article also contained a link to this strange and disturbing, but relevant animation https://youtu.be/yYfrU5WrYu0

> it appeared the worker had “intentionally stepped in front of the live engine” on the jet and that police were investigating that aspect.

Is this supposed to suggest it was suicide-by-jet-engine?

I'm unclear what work "intentionally" is doing in this sentence. Does it mean it's just normal walking as opposed to slipped-and-fell-off-the-wing, or that she walked in front of it knowing full well it was live and would be lethal?

Yes, that’s what they’re suggesting.

The plane was taxiing after just landing so no workers should be anywhere near it.

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