A stowaway who hid in the landing gear of a plane flying from Algeria to France was somehow able to survive the two-and-a-half-hour flight in the non-heated and non-pressurized wheel well.
The plane had come from the western Algerian town of Oran and landed in Paris’ Orly airport in the mid-morning. The unidentified man was found barely alive during technical checks of the Air Algerie plane after it touched down, prosecutors told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
The man, believed to be in his 20s, was transported to a nearby hospital for treatment. A source from the airport told AFP that he was “in a life-threatening condition because of severe hypothermia.”
Stowaways in the unpressurized wheelhouses and cargo holds of planes face harsh conditions. Temperatures can plummet to between -50 C and -60 C, and stowaways must contend with a lack of oxygen as the aircraft climbs to its cruising altitude of around 30,000 to 40,000 feet.
From 1947 to 2020, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) found 128 incidences of people around the world stowing away in plane landing gear compartments, the Guardian reported. These people are known in the industry as wheel-well stowaways.
More than 75 per cent of those wheel-well stowaways died.
An FAA report from 1996 found that many wheel-well stowaways attempted the dangerous mode of transport to escape unfavourable living conditions in their home countries. The report also found that wheel-well stowaways likely enter a state akin to hibernation during flight, where the body’s metabolism and oxygen intake falls to accommodate the adverse conditions.
The reported numbers of wheel-well stowaways are likely lower than the actual number of instances, the FAA found, as some survivors could escape undetected after landing while other victims may have fallen from planes unnoticed into the ocean.
In 2019, the body of a suspected stowaway fell hundreds of metres from a plane flying over southwest London, landing in the garden of a man’s home, just missing him as he sunbathed.
In April of this year, a dead man was discovered in the wheel well of a KLM flight that took off from Lagos, Nigeria and landed at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam.
Four months earlier, in January, two bodies were found in the landing gear of a plane that flew from Santiago, Chile to Bogotá, Colombia.
— With files from Reuters