Watch: Airline Worker Miarcously Escapes Serious Injury After Falling From Open Aircraft Door When Colleagues Remove the Airstairs Too Soon

An airline worker in Indonesia has miraculously escaped serious injury after falling out of an open aircraft door in Indonesia when his colleagues accidentally removed the airstairs away from the door just as he stepped off the airplane.

The exact location and date of the alarming incident are still unknown, but we do know that the recent accident occurred on a Transnusa Airlines Airbus A320 somewhere in Indonesia.

The ground worker had been completing his duties onboard the aircraft and was about to step off so that the aircraft could depart when the airstairs were removed prematurely.

In a shocking video, however, the ground worker doesn’t notice that the airstairs are being removed because he is still talking to people inside the plane and steps backwards onto where he thought the airstairs should be.

The incident is reminiscent of a 2020 accident at Helsinki Airport when a Finnair flight attendant was seriously injured when he fell approximately 3.6 metres to the ground from the rear door of an Airbus A320.

In that incident, the aircraft was again parked at a remote gate, and the airstairs were removed from the rear of the aircraft when the flight attendant was standing halfway between the airplane and the airstairs.

Back in 2018, an Air India flight attendant suffered much more serious injuries after she fell from the open door of a larger Boeing 777. The 53-year-old veteran crew member sustained a broken leg and broke both her heels after attempting to close the cabin door without any ground service equipment in place.

Matt’s take

While thankfully rare, accidents such as these are not unheard of and are a major cause for concern within the aviation industry. In the latest case, the third-party ground service provider should not have been removing the airstairs from the side of the plane until the cabin door was shut.

That would have prevented not only this latest accident but also the type of accident demonstrated by the Air India incident in which a crew member was left to close a cabin door without a jetty or airstairs attached to the side of the aircraft.

Interestingly, despite safety concerns, some airlines still regularly allow crew members to open and close cabin doors without any ground service equipment attached.