In the heart of Paris, a jaw-dropping discovery unfolded as a young man was unearthed, concealed in the landing gear compartment of a commercial plane arriving from Algeria. Despite the harsh ordeal and severe hypothermia, the man miraculously clung to life after enduring the treacherous journey.
The mysterious man, believed to be in his 20s, was stumbled upon during routine technical checks after the Air Algerie flight from Oran landed at Paris’s Orly airport. Astonishingly, he had no identification on him and was swiftly whisked off to the hospital in a critical condition.
Initial reports from the airport described the man as “alive but in a life-threatening condition due to severe hypothermia”. To put it in perspective, commercial aircraft soar at altitudes of 30,000 to 40,000 feet, where temperatures can plummet to bone-chilling lows of -50 degrees Celsius (-58F). Coupled with the lack of oxygen in the landing gear compartment, surviving such extreme conditions seems nothing short of a miracle.
Incredibly, unsettling statistics from the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) revealed that a total of 132 individuals, known as wheel-well stowaways, had attempted to travel in the landing gear compartments of commercial aircraft between 1947 and 2021.
This startling revelation is not an isolated incident. Earlier this year, a man’s lifeless body was found in the landing gear of a plane at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, having previously taken off from Nigeria en route to Toronto. Similarly, four months prior, two passengers were discovered deceased upon arrival in the landing gear storage area of a flight from Santiago de Chile to Bogota.
But perhaps the most bone-chilling incident occurred in July 2019, when the frozen body of a man plummeted into a garden in a London suburb. It was suspected that he had been hiding in the landing gear compartment of a Kenya Airways plane as it approached Heathrow airport.
The grim reality is that the mortality rate for individuals attempting to travel in this manner is a staggering 77 percent, according to the FAA’s data.
These perilous attempts to stow away on commercial flights not only endanger the lives of the individuals involved but also pose serious safety concerns for the aviation industry as a whole. The risks of hiding in the undercarriage of an aircraft cannot be overstated, and the dangers far outweigh any potential benefits of such a desperate act.
