Cheap way to y (and die)

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

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Height: 11.5km
Temperature at that height: About -57C

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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
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