The odds were steeply against the stowaway whose body was found in a London garden on Sunday after falling from the wheel well of a Kenya Airways flight from Nairobi.
People have been known to survive after clambering into the confined space of an aircraft’s landing gear compartment but they are the exception rather than the rule.
In this case, the man is believed to have stowed away in the landing gear wheel well and fallen out when the gear was deployed prior to landing at Heathrow Airport.
The body reportedly fell a metre (39 inches) away from a resident sunbathing in the garden in Clapham in south-west London at about 3.30 pm British Summer Time.
A neighbor told the BBC he heard a “whomp” and looked out of an upstairs window and saw the body and blood all over the wall of the garden.
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“So I went outside, and it was just then the neighbor came out and he was very shaken,” he said.
A bag, water and some food were found in the landing gear compartment when the plane landed.
Kenya Airways said the incident was being treated as sudden death and was being investigated by police.
“The 6,840km (4250-mile) flight takes eight hours and 50 minutes. It is unfortunate that a person has lost his life by stowing aboard one of our aircraft and we express our condolences,” the airline said in a statement.
“Kenya Airways is working closely with the relevant authorities in Nairobi and London as they fully investigate this case.”
The Metropolitan Police in London are also looking at the incident and said a post mortem would be carried out.
Kenyan and British authorities are also working to establish the man’s identity.
This is not the first time a stowaway has fallen out of a jet and landed in a London suburb.
in 2015, a stowaway on a British Airways jet was found dead after falling out of a British Airways jet as it approached Heathrow after flying from Johannesburg.
Miraculously, a second man hiding in the undercarriage survived the 12-hour flight and was hospitalized with injuries.
However, he defied the odds.
People have been stowing away on airliners since at least 1946 when a 12-year-old stowed away on a Douglas DC-3 flight from Kupang to Darwin and survived to become an Australian citizen and marry.
He survived because the DC-3 did not fly at the heights current aircraft do.
Between 1947 and June 2015, the US Federal Aviation Administration recorded 113 attempts to hide in a wheel well on 101 flights departing or landing in the US but more than three-quarters died.
An FAA spokesman told the VICE website Motherboard: “The environmental and physiological conditions that such stowaways face should, particularly in the higher altitude exposures, lead to almost certain death for the stowaways.
“That approximately 24 percent have survived highlights some lesser known aspects of human tolerance for extreme conditions.”
Dangers include being crushed by the retracting landing gear, hypothermia in the bone-chilling temperatures at altitude, gas embolisms because of the considerably lower air pressure and death due to lack of oxygen.
The FAA believes the number of deaths due to people falling out of wheel wells is under reported because some incidents occur while aircraft are over water.
