On New Year’s Eve, an American/Piedmont Airlines baggage handler was killed in a freak accident. She was identified as Courtney Edwards, 34.

The worker at the Montgomery Regional Airport in Central Alabama was sucked into a plane’s engine. Operations at the airport ceased for several hours while the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration investigated the tragic incident.

The tragedy happened at around 3 pm in the afternoon on Saturday, New Year’s Eve, while flight AA3408 from Montgomery to Dallas/Fort Worth was at the gate. The plane was supposed to take off at 3:46 pm and the engine was running.

Montgomery Regional Airport management confirmed that an employee working for Piedmont Airlines, which is an American Airlines subsidiary, was killed after what they called an “industrial accident.”

The flight was canceled after the accident, and the airport shut down for several hours, reopening and resuming operations at around 8:30 pm on Saturday.

American Airlines, which owns both Piedmont Airlines and Envoy Air, released a statement and consoled the family and friends of the victim. 

Ground accidents at airports do happen occasionally. In August, Simple Flying reported that a Russian airport worker had died after getting hit by a propeller of an aircraft.

A baggage handler working at a New Orleans airport died in August while unloading baggage when her hair got stuck in the belt loader of a Frontier Airlines airplane.