A man miraculously survived an overnight flight inside the cargo plane’s nose gear after a 12-hour flight from South Africa, landing in Amsterdam on Sunday morning.
Stowaways are extremely unlikely to survive the perilous conditions of an unheated and oxygen-depleted landing gear, particularly after such a long flight.
The “guy is doing well under the circumstances,” according to the Royal Dutch military police. He was taken to the hospital, but no more information about his health has been released.
Op Schiphol is in het neuswiel van een vrachtvliegtuig uit Z-Afrika een verstekeling aangetroffen. De man maakt het naar omstandigheden goed en is vervoerd naar het ziekenhuis. De Marechaussee doet onderzoek. #KMar_PenB_SPL pic.twitter.com/A7DXGmIbpf
— Koninklijke Marechaussee (@Marechaussee) January 23, 2022
The individual was discovered shortly after the Cargolux-operated Boeing 747 freighter plane landed at Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport, according to a police official.
When he was discovered, he was claimed to be quite cold, but his temperature quickly climbed.
Stowaway attempts are common at South African airports, and despite the fact that airlines are compelled to take extra safeguards, they are not always successful.
A stowaway’s body fell from the landing gear of a plane on final approach to Heathrow Airport in 2019. The body was said to have fallen into the garden of a South London home, narrowly missing a sunbathing resident who was only three feet away.
The stowaway had climbed into the landing gear of a Kenya Airways flight from Nairobi, where he would have been subjected to temperatures as low as -60 degrees Celsius (-76F).
In 2015, following an 11-hour journey from Johannesburg, a man fell from a British Airways plane onto the roof of an office building in Richmond, West London. In the fall, the man was beheaded and cops discovered him in an air conditioning unit on the roof.
A second guy was discovered comatose in the plane’s undercarriage but died from injuries acquired during the flight many months later.
A Guatemalan stowaway survived a more than two-hour flight inside the landing gear of an American Airlines Boeing 737-800 flight from Guatemala City to Miami on Saturday last November.
The 26-year-old stowaway was brought to a local hospital for evaluation after the incident left him dizzy and disoriented. He was arrested by US Customs and Border Protection after being given the all-clear.
