A person who jumped a fence and was on a runway at Denver International Airport was struck and killed by a Frontier Airlines plane during take-off, airport authorities said. The collision sparked an engine fire and forced passengers to evacuate.
The plane, en route from Denver to Los Angeles International Airport, “reported striking a pedestrian during takeoff at DEN at approximately 11:19 p.m. on Friday”, according to a post on the airport’s official social media account.
A spokesman for the airport said the person, 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.
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“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.”
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.”