A woman has been found dead at one of the US’ busiest airports after a grisly incident in baggage claim.

Things go wrong at airports, there’s no doubt about that — take the supersonic boom that broke $10m worth of windows or the A380 that pulled off a dangerous if well-recovered ‘crab landing’ at Heathrow airport as prime examples. However, none that we’ve seen have ever been quite so tragic as this one.

Emergency services in Chicago have confirmed that a woman has died in what appears to be a freak accident at one of the world’s busiest airports. Found at 8am on Thursday, the body was found in the baggage claim section of the airport, where fire services reported that the woman had become trapped under the luggage conveyor belt.

It has not yet been made public whether the woman was a passenger or a member of airport staff, but several outlets have reported that she was in her forties and the incident took place in Terminal 5 of O’Hare airport, which services several international airlines as well as domestic carriers Delta and Southwest.

Behind The Scenes At Baggage Claim

Earlier this year, we published a leaked video showing how your bags are treated by baggage-sorting machinery as they move through the airport. When you see the power and brutality involved, it becomes much easier to understand how much a tragic and severe incident might have been able to unfold…

The video, originally shared by Skiplagged, shows a series of bags moving along a converter belt before being absolutely smashed into by a large machine designed to move them onto a parallel belt, presumably headed for a different destination.

While many people notice that their bags emerge at their destination’s luggage carousel looking a little worse for wear, the blame for this is all too often laid at the door of baggage handlers or airline staff. This video shows that, rather than being a result of human error, this savagery is actually by design, a result of the robotic machines that are substituted in for flesh-and-blood handlers.