Man dies at Milan airport after being sucked into jet engine
(NYT) — A man died at one of Milan’s main airports Tuesday after being sucked into a jet engine on a taxiway, an airport spokesperson said.
The man was not a passenger nor did he work at Milan Bergamo Airport, Sacbo, the company that operates the airport, said in a statement. It was not immediately clear how the man gained access to the airport’s apron and then the taxiway, where he “approached a stationary commercial aircraft with engines running” and was killed, the statement said.
Flight operations at the airport were suspended at 10:20 a.m. local time because of “a problem” on the taxiway, the airport said in a statement, and resumed at noon.
“Today’s tragic event has deeply shaken the entire airport community,” Giovanni Sanga, Sacbo’s president, said in the statement. “From the outset,” he added, “in addition to ensuring the immediate management of the emergency and assistance to passengers and crew, we have also focused our attention on the colleagues who witness the episode and were deeply affected by it.”
Sacbo did not identify the airline that was operating the plane involved in the episode. “The exact circumstances of the incident are under investigation by the judicial authorities, to whom Sacbo continues to provide full cooperation,” the statement said.
Nineteen flights at Milan Bergamo Airport were canceled and several were delayed, according to FlightAware, a company that tracks flight information. The airport is the third busiest in Italy after Fiumicino Airport in Rome and Malpensa Airport, which also serves Milan.
Airport tarmacs and taxiways usually have strict security protocols, and fatal accidents on them are rare.
Congress urged not to axe system that prevents satellite collisions
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Hundreds of U.S. companies on Tuesday urged Congress to back off a plan to kill a small federal office tasked with managing satellite traffic in space, a badly needed civilian effort initiated by President Donald Trump’s first administration but now imperiled by cuts.
The White House’s 2026 budget proposal seeks $10 million for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Space Commerce, an 84% cut from the office’s 2025 funding that would terminate Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS), a civilian system to help prevent satellite collisions and alert operators of potential crashes.
Four-hundred and fifty companies from seven different industry groups, including Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Amazon’s AMZN.O Kuiper satellite unit, wrote in a joint letter on Tuesday to the Senate committee overseeing NOAA that without funding TraCSS, “U.S. commercial and government satellite operators would face greater risks – putting critical missions in harm’s way, raising the cost of doing business, and potentially driving U.S. industry to relocate overseas.”
The rise of vast satellite constellations like SpaceX’s Starlink and heightened military and commercial activities in Earth’s orbit have driven up risks of collisions between the roughly 12,000 active satellites in space and thousands more pieces of uncontrollable junk, prompting efforts to create what is essentially a civil air traffic control system for space.