Wheel well: It appears the dead man was hiding there.
It is a popular place for stowaways
aways In April last year, a 15-year-old boy sneaked into the wheel heel well of a Boeing 767 and ew from San Jose, California, to Maui, Hawaii. He survived. vived. In February 2014, crews at Dulles International Airportt in suburban Washington found the body of a man inside the wheel well of an SAA plane. Its not difcult to climb inside a wheel well, says Jose Guillen, a ground-operations coordinator at Chicagos OHare International Airport. You can grab on to the struts and landing gear assembly, mbly, kind of like a ladder, he says. And you just jump on the tyre and climb into the wheel well. But after takeoff, many scenarios could kill a stowawayy hiding in the landing gear wheel well. Inside, theres not much room even less than in the boot of a car, says Guillen. A stowaway would need to guess where the tyre is going to fold in when it closes after takeoff. Otherwise, theres a high risk of getting crushed
Flight time: 11 hours and 45 minutes
Flight distance: Nearly 9 656km
1 2
Height: 11.5km Temperature at that height: About -57C
3 3
Undercarriage: The stowaway who
survived was hiding here
There have been several cases of stowaways being
found dead clinging to the landing gear of planes. In 2012, a man from Mozambique fell from the undercarriage of a Heathrow-bound ight from Angola on to a street under a ight path near Richmond, UK. An inquest found he may have survived freezing temperatures for most of the ight, but was dead or nearly dead by the time he hit the ground. In April this year, an Indonesian stowaway survived an hourlong ight from Sumatra to Jakarta hidden in the undercarriage
Landing gear bay
The body of a presumed stowaway was discovered on a
British Airways plane that arrived at Heathrow from South Africa in August 2012. The hiding place would have exposed the man to temperatures as low as -60C and severe oxygen deprivation during the 11-and-a-half-hour ight from Cape Town. An airline spokesperson said stowaways were a rare occurrence on any passenger aircraft and there was little chance of surviving a ight in the landing gear bay. Anyone hiding in the compartment risked being crushed or burnt by the wheels after the plane took off. A Romanian man survived the far shorter ight from Vienna to Heathrow in 2010 while stowed in the landing gear bay. Police attributed his escape to the fact that the plane ew at a far lower altitude than usual due to bad weather, at no more than 7.6km high during the one-hour journey. Most of those who chance such a perilous passage would be ying well above 9km, where oxygen levels and temperatures make survival virtually impossible Graphics24