DENVER — A person who jumped a fence and was on a runway at Denver International Airport was struck and killed by a Los Angeles-bound plane during takeoff, airport authorities said. The collision sparked an engine fire and forced passengers to evacuate.
The Frontier Airlines plane, en route 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 X account.
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 grounds. 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.”
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 the airport is “rolling the trucks now” before the pilot tells the tower that “[we] 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 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 airline said the plane was carrying 224 passengers and seven crew members.
“We are investigating this incident and gathering more information in coordination with the airport and other safety authorities,” the airline said.
Passengers were 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 hospitals.
One passenger, Jacob Athens, posted video showing people sliding down with their backpacks. He also posted photos of what looked like a damaged engine.
“As we were lifting off the engine of the plane exploded. There was so much smoke we couldn’t even see 1 ft in front of us,” Athens said on his Facebook page, adding that passengers had to wait for more than a hour on the runway and “still no transport or help with the cold.”
Other video shows passengers calmly walking down the aisle of the plane and using the slide to evacuate. After doing so, they were told to step away from the aircraft.
Denver airport said the National Transportation Safety Board had been notified and that runway 17L, where the incident took place, was closed amid an investigation. It reopened Saturday around 11 a.m.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a post on X that the person “breached airport security at Denver Int’l Airport, deliberately scaled a perimeter fence, and ran out onto a runway.”
He added: “No one should EVER trespass on an airport.”
The incident came a day after a Delta Air Lines employee was killed while on the job at Orlando International Airport in Florida. In a statement, the airline said the employee was killed Thursday night but did not provide 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.”
