"Extremely saddened to share that our technician Rohit Pandey passed away last night in an unfortunate incident at Kolkata airport. He was doing maintenance work in right hand main landing gear wheel well area of a Q400 aircraft which was parked in Bay No. 32 at airport," SpiceJet, the Indian airline which owns the plane Pandey was working on, said in a statement following the incident.
"Inadvertently, the main landing gear hydraulic door closed and he got stuck in between the hydraulic door flaps … The hydraulic doors were broken to rescue Rohit Pandey but he was declared dead," the airline said. "The entire SpiceJet family stands together in grief in this unfortunate incident."
According to airport director Kaushik Bhattacharya, the 26-year-old technician was “sucked into the lower end of the aircraft due to hydraulic pressure.” As a result, his body had to be cut out of the airplane.
Police have visited the scene of the incident and will collect evidence with forensic experts.
"Our officers have reached the spot. We are talking to other staffers of the airline who were present there. We are trying to understand whether it was a technical glitch or the result of someone's callousness," an unidentified police officer told India Today.
Last week, India’s aviation regulator, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), issued notices outlining poor training protocols to SpiceJet after several instances of planes overshooting runways took place in recent months as a result of poor weather conditions.
