If passengers die during flights, or have unusual or frightening experiences, it is generally in the cabin of the aircraft. However, some people sometimes travel clandestinely on landing gear. This is what happened on Thursday December 28, 2023. A man aged around twenty was discovered alive in the landing gear of a plane coming from Oran, in Algeria. He would have been found “around 10:30 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.” when checking the device. The plane bound for Paris-Orly was therefore illegally transporting the victim. According to AFP, the man would be “severe hypothermia”. After the intervention of the emergency services and the air transport gendarmerie (GTA), the man was reportedly transported to a hospital. from Île-de-France in a state “absolute emergency”. During transport to the hospital center, by firefighters, the man was not dead. An exceptional case, since it would have traveled in negative temperatures, the landing gear being neither heated nor pressurized. As a reminder, a commercial aircraft generally flies at a cruising altitude of 12,000 meters. The temperature could therefore have reached -50 degrees.
More and more stowaways are adopting this practice
Since his hospitalization, the mystery remains regarding the state of health of the stowaway. But the young man would have little chance of survival. The practice of hiding in aircraft landing gear has been already used several times. On January 7, 2020, the lifeless body of a child of around ten years old had been found in a landing gear. The Air France plane, coming from Abidjan in Ivory Coast, landed at Roissy airport (Paris). It was a ground handling agent who made the macabre discovery after a 6-hour flight. On January 7, 2023, these are two stowaways who were found dead shortly after the landing of a plane flying between Santiago, Chile and Bogotá (Colombia). “Upon arrival at El Dorado Airport, airline personnel found the bodies of two people who had traveled irregularly in the landing gear”, the airline said in a press release. While some manage to hang on until they land, this is not the case for everyone. In 2019, the body of a man was discovered in a residence in south-west London. The stowaway is believed to have fallen from the landing gear of a Kenya Airways flight to London Heathrow Airport. In recent years, several passengers have died by falling from the landing gear of aircraft in flight, or died due to extreme flight conditions.