Stowaway survives -50C flight from Algeria to Paris in landing gear compartment
A stowaway who survived -50C temperatures during a flight from Algeria to Paris was discovered in the plane’s landing gear compartment after it landed in the French capital.
The man, believed to be in his 20s, was found during technical checks after the Air Algerie flight from Oran touched down at Orly airport, prosecutors told the AFP news agency.
He had no ID on him, and was taken to hospital in serious condition, they said.
An airport source earlier reported that the man “was alive but in a life-threatening condition because of severe hypothermia”.
Commercial aircraft cruise at 30,000ft to 40,000ft altitude, where temperatures typically drop to around -50C, and a lack of oxygen makes survival unlikely for anyone travelling in a landing gear compartment, which is neither heated nor pressurised.
According to US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) data, 132 people tried to travel in the landing gear compartments of commercial aircraft between 1947 and 2021.
Those who do so are known in the industry as wheel-well stowaways.
In April of this year, the body of a man was discovered in the landing gear of a plane at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport that had flown in from Toronto, prior to which it had been in Nigeria.
Four months earlier, two passengers were found dead on arrival in the landing gear storage space of a plane which flew from Chile’s capital, Santiago, and its Colombian counterpart, Bogota.
In July 2019, the frozen body of a man fell into a garden in a London suburb as it was approaching Heathrow airport. He was believed to have stowed himself away in the landing gear compartment of the Kenya Airways plane.
The mortality rate for people risking such journeys is extremely high, at 77 per cent, according to FAA figures.
