On Saturday, the bodies of two brothers were discovered in the landing gear of an Air Algerie Airbus A330 plane.
Workers were alerted to the horrific finding after a third brother received a distressing video call from his brothers trapped inside the landing gear box.
According to local media accounts, the two brothers, aged 20 and 23, were discovered by maintenance workers at Algiers International Airport. The plane was temporarily detained while a criminal investigation was launched.
The seven-year-old aircraft had last landed in Algiers from Paris, according to the flight-tracking website Flight Radar 24. It’s unclear when the Algerian brothers stepped onto the landing gear, but their plan appears to have been to fly to Barcelona.
Barcelona would be a great route because it is only a half-hour trip from Algiers and the plane only climbs to roughly 34,000 feet for a brief period of time.
Despite the dangers of the flight, the boys would have only been exposed to the harsh conditions of the landing gear compartment for a brief time. Stowaways have died from a mixture of hypothermia, burns, and extended hypoxia in comparable circumstances.
However, in the days leading up to the discovery, the same plane had traveled to Dubai and back for more than six hours. It takes more than two hours to fly to Paris.
A Guatemalan stowaway survived a two-hour flight in the landing gear compartment of an American Airlines flight from Guatemala City to Miami last November.
In January, a guy amazingly survived a 12-hour flight from South Africa to Amsterdam in the landing gear compartment of a plane.
After landing in Paris in March, a juvenile Algerian stowaway was discovered in the landing gear of an Air Algerie plane. The stowaway was seen on video to be in good health and conversing with the ground crew who discovered him.
