A man was discovered on Thursday hidden in the landing gear compartment of a commercial aircraft that flew to Paris from Algeria with severe hypothermia, but alive, French authorities said.
The man, believed to be in his 20s, was found during technical checks after the Air Algerie flight from Oran, Algeria, landed at Orly airport in Paris in mid-morning, prosecutors said.
He had no identification 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 9,000m to 12,000m altitude where temperatures typically drop to about minus-50°C, and a lack of oxygen makes survival unlikely for anyone traveling in a landing gear compartment which is neither heated nor pressurized.
According to US Federal Aviation Administration data, 132 people — known in the industry as wheel-well stowaways — tried to travel in the landing gear compartments of commercial aircraft between 1947 and 2021.
The body of a man was discovered in April in the landing gear of an aircraft in Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport that had flown in from Toronto, but previously took off from Nigeria.
Four months earlier, two passengers were found dead on arrival in the landing gear storage space of a flight between Santiago de Chile and Bogota.
The frozen body of a man in July 2019 fell into a garden in a suburb of London, believed to have been in the landing gear compartment of a Kenya Airways plane approaching Heathrow airport.
The mortality rate for people attempting to travel this way is 77 percent, the US Federal Aviation Administration data showed.
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