A stowaway found in the landing gear of a plane that had just arrived at Paris Orly Airport on Thursday morning has been transported to a local hospital in critical conditions, suffering from severe hypothermia, sources have told local media.
The stowaway was found in the landing gear of an Air Algerie plane that had just flown from Oran, a coastal city in the north of Algeria, which is around a four-and-a-half-hour drive from the capital Algiers.
The Boeing 737 landed at Paris Orly Airport at around 10:15 am following a two-hour flight from Oran, and engineers discovered the stowaway at around 11:00 am following a routine inspection.
The young man, aged between 20 and 30 years old, was rushed to Henri-Mondor Hospital in Créteil, where he remains in a serious condition. The man was not carrying any identity documents.
Data from Flight Radar 24 shows that the aircraft quickly reached a cruising altitude of around 36,000 feet, where it remained for over an hour before slowly descending over the next hour until its arrival in France.
At those altitudes, temperatures in the unpressurised landing gear compartment would have plunged to around −50°C. The lack of air could also lead to prolonged hypoxia.
Last June, the dead bodies of two brothers were discovered in the landing gear of an Airbus A330 plane operated by Air Algerie. It’s believed that the brothers were trying to reach Barcelona because it’s just a short hop from Algiers, so the aircraft wouldn’t have reached just a high altitude.
In November 2021, a Guatemalan stowaway managed to survive a more than two-hour flight in the landing gear compartment of an American Airlines flight from Guatemala City to Miami.
And in January 2022, a man miraculously survived in the landing gear compartment of a plane during a 12-hour flight from South Africa to Amsterdam.
