2-year-old boy is swept away on luggage conveyor belt at Newark Airport in latest terror at beleaguered travel hub
A 2-year-old boy was swept away out of his mom’s sight after climbing onto a luggage conveyor belt at Newark Libery International Airport — the latest scary trip at the troubled travel hub.
The Staten Island toddler wandered onto the ankle-high conveyor belt where passengers drop off their luggage before takeoff, while his mother was busy rebooking a flight with a JetBlue employee in Terminal A on May 28, according to sources and the Port Authority PBA.
The belt carried the helpless tot away from his mom and dropped him down a chute into the luggage screening area on the lower level of the terminal.
“It was something that happened in the blink of an eye,” Frank Conti, the Port Authority PBA President told
Nearby Port Authority police officers Joseph DeSilvio and Angel Paulino heard what happened and leaped into action to track the toddler down.
“At one point, the system separated into two conveyor belt routes,” the association said on Instagram.
“Each officer continued their search in different directions.”
After about five pulse-pounding minutes, one of the heroic cops found the toddler — sobbing, but unharmed — near an X-ray machine and scooped him up before he went into it.
The child lost a shoe and sock during the harrowing ride, sources said.
His panic-stricken mom was reunited with her son before they flew to Tampa, Fla., for a vacation, according to sources.
The tot’s run-in with the conveyor belt is a reminder of a horrifying incident in which a 5-month-old from Maryland was killed after being in 2013. The belt was not running when the mom placed her daughter’s carseat on it, but it suddenly switched on and crushed the girl to death.
The hair-raising ordeal last week is the latest troubling incident to occur at the beleaguered airport.
Newark Airport has been described as a “delay-plagued hellhole” for a slew of problems, including unprecedented backups on the tarmac, a glut of cancellations, the possible spread of an infectious disease, ongoing construction, FAA controllers walking off the job and terrifying blackouts of its control towers.
The situation at the travel hub got so bad that one federal air safety employee warned the public not to fly out of the embattled airport, warning that it’s “not safe.”
And on April 28, air traffic controllers were left without radar and communications for 90 horrifying seconds, resulting in a domino effect that delayed thousands of flights. At least five air traffic controllers took a 45-day trauma leave because the scare rattled them so much. A similar blackout occurred in November last year.
Two weeks ago, New Jersey health officials about a potential measles outbreak when an infected individual traveled through the airport’s Terminal B.
