Wing Walker Hit By Arriving American Airlines Jet — Similar Accidents Show How Dangerous Ramp Jobs Can Be

Tragically, a wing walker was hit by the engine of an arriving American Airlines aircraft on November 12th at Dallas – Fort Worth. This was originally reported by aviation watchdog JonNYC and hasn’t been picked up anywhere else.

JonNYC has now shared video of the incident. It will be difficult for many to watch, so I will not embed it here. But you can see it if you click through.

At DFW on Wednesday, I'm being told a wing walker was run into/over by the engine of an arriving AA plane, at least that's the details I've heard.

— JonNYC (@xJonNYC) November 14, 2025

Engine ingestion and aircraft collision fatalities for wing walkers happen more often than one might imagine. It’s hardly a daily or monthly occurrence, but for an industry so focused on safety it’s a suprisingly non-zero event. For instance,

• American Eagle (Envoy Air) Embraer 175 arrived as flight AA3408 from Dallas – Fort Worth to Montgomery, Alabama with an inoperative auxiliary power unit, so the left engine was kept running at the gate while waiting for ground power on December 31, 2022.

  A Piedmont ramp agent approached the aircraft to place cones and was pulled into the running engine and killed. The NTSB final report concluded that she repeatedly approached too close to the engine despite warnings. They also highlighted cognitive impairment from a cannabis product as a contributing factor.

• Delta 1111 from Los Angeles to San Antonio taxied to the gate on one engine on Jun 23, 2023. A ground worker was ingested into the operating engine and killed. This incident was classified as a suicide.

• An American Airlines wing walker was killed in Charlotte on January 27, 2025 after walking back toward the gate following pushback when he was run over from behind by the tug that had just pushed the aircraft.

• Some classic cases that have been studied are American Airlines in San Juan (1989) where a ramp guide stumbled while walking behind an aircraft’s nose gear during pushback; US Airways at LaGuardia (1992) where a worker was killed by a tug during pushback; and Delta at New York JFK (1997) where a wing walker was run over by the aircraft’s nose gear after walking in front of it to retrieve a headset cord while the aircraft was still moving.

Typically, ground rules manage this by making certain no one enters the hazard zone until the plane’s parking brake is set, engines are switched off and rotating beacon lights are off (a proxy for “engines have fully stopped”).

Sometimes planes land with their auxiliary power units inoperative, and it’s common to keep one engine running for power and air until ground power is connected. And sometimes ramp agents internalize “arrived at gate means engines off” even when APUs are inoperative. Sometimes procedures are breached. Standard hand signals can be misinterpreted. The cockpit has poor visibility of the exact position of people near the engines, especially at night or in bad weather.

The fact that these incidents don’t happen a lot makes it easy to feel like nothing bad like this happens, and become too lax. A wing walker may be focused on the aircraft wingtips and tail clearances, and not the tug, or walks into the path of the aircraft.

I’m not going to offer speculation or commentary specifically on the November 12th tragedy, just to note that this is a more dangerous job than we – and those who do it, even – often think about.