A stowaway was left in critical condition with hypothermia after being found in the landing gear compartment of an Air Algerie plane at Orly airport in Paris, authorities said.
The man, aged in his 20s, was discovered by maintenance workers after the flight from Oran, Algeria, landed in the French capital on Thursday morning, prosecutors told AFP.
An airport official said the man, who had no identification, “was alive but in life-threatening condition due to severe hypothermia” after the two-and-a-half-hour flight.
Stowaways in depressurized wheelhouses can face temperatures between -58 and -76 degrees Fahrenheit, as well as a lack of oxygen while flying at cruising altitudes of more than 30,000 feet.
According to the United States Federal Aviation Administration, 132 people attempted to fly in the landing gear compartments of commercial airliners between 1947 and 2021.
The mortality rate for people who fly this way is 77%, according to the FAA.
A stowaway hid in the landing gear of a flight to Paris. SOPA/LightRocket Images via Getty Images
In April, the body of a man was discovered in the gearbox of a plane at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport that had arrived from Toronto but had previously taken off from Nigeria.
Four months earlier, two stowaways were found dead in the landing gear compartment of a flight from Santiago, Chile, and Bogotá, Colombia.
In 2019, a frozen body landed in a man’s garden, narrowly missing him, after falling thousands of feet from a Kenya Airways plane flying over south-west London.
The stowaway survived the flight from Oran to Paris on the Air Algerie plane, but suffered hypothermia. Andia/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Four years earlier, the body of a stowaway on a British Airways flight from Johannesburg to London Heathrow airport landed in a shop in Richmond, southwest of the capital.
A second stowaway survived the 10-hour flight and was found in the plane’s landing gear.
With post cables
Categories: Trending
Source: vtt.edu.vn