Awful: Delta Employee Hit By Truck At Atlanta Airport

My goodness, I hope this person makes a quick recovery…

Delta wing walker hit by waste disposal truck

@xJonNYC shares security camera footage of a terrible incident that happened on the ramp at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL) on Saturday, December 10, 2022. In the video, you can see a Delta Boeing 717 starting to pull into gate C36.

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There seems to be a “wing walker” standing there to assist with the plane’s arrival, but in the video footage you can see a waste disposal truck hitting the person from behind and knocking them over at a high speed. Once the driver realizes he hit someone, he immediately stops the vehicle and gets out to help. Others are also seen running to assist this person.

Interestingly at the same time that this happens, you can hear someone announcing “attention lav techs, lav techs, please, please watch your speed out on the ramp, and pay attention to your surroundings.” It’s not entirely clear if that announcement was being made “live,” or if this was being made after the fact, when this footage was reviewed.

You can see the video for yourself below (though you may not want to, so use your own discretion).

Now that this has gotten some publicity, there’s an update about this incident, per a police report:

• The worker “was laying on the ground and bleeding from her head” when the responding officer arrived
• She was transported to Grady Memorial Hospital, where she was determined to be in stable condition
• The driver of the waste management vehicle told police that he “was looking down at his tablet” before hitting the woman
• The driver was cited, and airport security confiscated his airport badge, and he was escorted from the scene by Delta

I’m hugely relieved to hear that the woman who was hit is in stable condition, and is expected to make a recovery. The accident looked awful, and I could have seen this ending even worse (which isn’t to minimize the injuries she sustained). I hope Delta takes good care of this employee and her family, and gives her plenty of time to recover.

I’m surprised by how safe the ramp usually is

Obviously this is awful to see, and I hope precautions are taken to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

That being said, I’m kind of surprised by how few incidents generally happen on the ramp at airports. Yes, the speed limit is supposed to be low, but you also have a lot going on. You have people constantly in a rush, a really complicated system for traffic priority, a lot of congestion, a lot of distractions, a combination of people driving and walking, and you don’t necessarily have the most tenured employees across the board.

I’m always amazed by how smoothly this seems to go a vast majority of the time, so that makes it especially sad to see something like this happen.

Bottom line

A Delta ramp employee was hit by a waste disposal truck at Atlanta Airport on Saturday. Incidents like this are extremely rare, so it’s terrible to see something like this happen. This allegedly happened because the driver was looking down at a tablet. Fortunately the woman who was hit is expected to make a full recovery.

What do you make of this incident?