A student pilot caused chaos at a Florida airport after he accessed an American Airlines plane and was tackled by workers before being arrested.
The incident took place at Orlando Melbourne International airport on Thursday morning, which subsequently closed for five hours.
Airport spokesman Lori Booker said a man, 22, who is originally from Trinidad and entered the US from Canada, parked his car curbside, jumped a fence and boarded the vacant passenger plane.
The Airbus 321 aircraft was based at maintenance facility and the plane wasn’t scheduled to fly when the incident happened, it is understood.
Th student boarded the Airlines Airbus A321 plane (pictured) and caused an airport lockdown
Airport spokesman Lori Booker (pictured) said the man’s motives are not known at this point
An avionics technician was in the plane’s galley when he saw a shadow, Booker said.
‘He turned around and said, ‘Who are you? Show me your badge,’ Booker told news outlets.
He grabbed the man and, with help from another technician, they got him off the plane.
Booker said that while one technician held the man down, the other called Orlando Melbourne airport police. The man broke free and ran along the airfield before police took him into custody about two minutes later.
Officials said the man has been charged with criminal attempt to steal an airplane.
The Joint Terrorism Task Force is investigating and trying to determine a motive in the case.
She told news outlets the student pilot, whose name hasn’t been released, also faces a visa violation and criminal trespassing charges.
Booker described as ‘heroic’ the four staff who had seen the student board the plane and those who approached him on-board.
The car left abandoned by the man was searched by robots before being towed away, Booker said
The man, who has a Florida state driver’s license, was a part-time student at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, where he studied aviation management and had completed some flight training, school spokesman Adam Lowenstein said.
The university is cooperating with authorities, he said, declining to provide the suspect’s name.
A sticker on the student’s car, and a number of social media posts, indicated he lived in the area at least recently.
The airport, which handles about 500,000 passengers a year, was evacuated and authorities conducted a security sweep of the entire airport, which reopened about five hours later, according to Booker.
Police (pictured) quickly arrived at the scene and took the man to Brevard County Jail
Two flights were delayed because of the incident, Booker said.
Melbourne resident Manan Karia told Florida Today that he approached the airport about 5am on NASA Boulevard to try to catch a 6 am Delta flight to Austin, Texas.
‘I drove by Keiser and Sears and saw a bunch of cars in both parking lots, which I thought was weird.
‘I get to the airport and there is a line about five cars deep, and a police officer has the entrance blocked with his car and lights are flashing. You can see more police cars with lights flashing around the airport,’ Karia said.
‘I finally get up to the officer, and he proceeds to tell me the airport is shut down and asks if I’m an employee or a passenger. I let him know I’m a passenger, and he tells me to go park at the Keiser parking lot.
‘That’s all the info they provided,’ Karia said. ‘I was just scouring Twitter and the internet trying to get more after that.’
Melbourne is 70 miles (112 kilometers) southeast of Orlando. Orlando-Melbourne is a popular airport for overhaul and maintenance, Booker said, and it’s not unusual to have as many as eight jets parked on the tarmac outside the repair center.