A student pilot hopped the fence of a busy Florida airport and somehow managed to sneak aboard a passenger jet early Thursday, before being tackled by two maintenance workers — a brazen security breach now being probed by the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force, reports said.
The 22-year-old suspect — who has not been publicly named, but was identified as a part-time Florida Institute of Technology aviation management student hailing from Trinidad & Tobago — parked his red sedan outside Orlando Melbourne International Airport around 2 a.m., then scaled a security fence, according to CNN.
He sprinted across the tarmac and climbed into a 200-plus-seat American Airlines Airbus A321, which was undergoing maintenance, the report said.
Aboard the plane, the intruder bumped into two workers, who demanded to see his ID and security badge, CNN reported.
When the man ignored the request and brushed past them toward the cockpit, the workers grabbed him and yanked him off the jet.
One of the quick-thinking maintenance workers ran to call for help, while the other, joined by two more colleagues, struggled to hold the man down.
“It appears that we have four heroes among us at Orlando Melbourne International Airport,” the hub’s spokeswoman, Lori Booker, told local outlet Spectrum News 13.
Authorities, ranging from local cops to the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force, raced to the scene and took the man into custody.
Investigators searched the man’s sedan using a robotic arm before deeming it safe and towing it away, CNN reported.
The motive of the suspect ― being held at Brevard County Jail with charges pending — remains unclear.
But “There obviously seemed to be planning involved,” Booker said.
The suspect, who was carrying a Florida driver’s license, was studying aviation management part-time at Florida Institute of Technology, and had completed some flight training, the school said in a statement.
The school did not name the student, but said that they were cooperating with the investigation.
Despite the alarming breach, Booker insisted that the airport’s “security worked just fine.”
The airport was placed on lockdown for several hours, but had returned to normal service by 7 a.m.
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