The mortality rate for people attempting to travel this way is 77%, according to the FAA figures.
I’m surprised it’s not higher
it probably has something to do with how few people have tried this. the article mentions they only know about 132 people who have tried this in the last 70 years. the “true” mortality rate could be a lot higher, and those people just got lucky.
also could be a sampling error, since the article mentions some people fall out of the plane before it lands, which may make the survivors stand out a bit more.
this has got to be a truly terrible way to die and i feel bad for all those people.
In July 2019, the frozen body of a man fell into a garden in a London suburb, believed to have been in the landing gear compartment of a Kenya Airways plane approaching Heathrow airport.
Living under the beginning of an approach into an airport, I’ve thought (just for fun) about the rare instances of hardware falling from the gear. I’d never thought about the chance of a body. I guess they really extend gear earlier than where I am, but I wonder how long it might take, on average, for a body to thaw enough to unstick from something after the gear are down and air is swirling around in there.
With all the vibration and turbulence I wouldn’t think too long.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A man has been discovered hidden in the landing gear compartment of a commercial aircraft that flew into Paris from Algeria with severe hypothermia but alive, French authorities have said.
The man, believed to be in his 20s, was found during technical checks after the Air Algerie flight from Oran, Algeria, landed at Paris’s Orly airport in mid-morning, prosecutors told AFP.
Commercial aircraft cruise at 30,000 to 40,000 feet altitude where temperatures typically drop to around -50 degrees Celsius (-58F), and a lack of oxygen makes survival unlikely for anyone travelling in a landing gear compartment which is neither heated nor pressurised.
According to US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) data cited in media, 132 people – known in the industry as wheel-well stowaways – attempted to travel in the landing gear compartments of commercial aircraft between 1947 and 2021.
In April of this year, the body of a man was discovered in the landing gear of an aircraft in Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport that had flown in from Toronto, but previously took off from Nigeria.
In July 2019, the frozen body of a man fell into a garden in a London suburb, believed to have been in the landing gear compartment of a Kenya Airways plane approaching Heathrow airport.
The original article contains 285 words, the summary contains 208 words. Saved 27%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
