Human Interest
How often do plane stowaways fall from the sky?─── 13:58 Fri, 14 Sep 2012
Police are investigating whether a man found dead on a west London street was a stowaway who fell from a plane. Just how often does this happen?
No-one saw the body fall from the sky on to Portman Avenue.
A few neighbours thought they heard something, a thud or a loud bang. But not a soul was around to witness a man hit the pavement of this quiet residential street in Mortlake, south-west London, early on a bright September Sunday.
Police say the death is being treated as unexplained. But early media reports all shared the same assumption - that he had stowed away in the landing gear of a plane flying to Heathrow, less than 10 miles away.
"He must have come down pretty much vertically to miss the parked cars," says John Taylor, 79, who heard a thump from his home across the street in this placid, affluent suburb. "I expect he was dead already. Poor chap must have been desperate."
Flowers mark the spot where a body was found in Mortlake It is not the first incident of this kind on the Heathrow flightpath.
In 2001, the body of Mohammed Ayaz, a 21-year-old Pakistani, was found in the car park of a branch of Homebase in nearby Richmond. Four years prior to that, another hidden passenger fell from the undercarriage of a plane on to a gasworks close to the store.
Others turned up at Heathrow itself. On 24 August, just 16 days before the discovery on Portman Ave, the remains of another man were found in the landing gear bay of a Boeing 747 after it touched down from a 6,000-mile flight from Cape Town. The bodies of two boys, thought to be as young as 12, were discovered in the undercarriage of a Ghana Airways flight from Accra in 2002.
Dr Stephen Veronneau, of the US Federal Aviation Administration, has identified 96 individuals around the world who have tried to travel in plane wheel wells since 1947. The incidents happened on 85 flights. Veronneau is working on the assumption that the Mortlake fatality was a stowaway.
Of these, more than three-quarters have proved fatal.
It isn't difficult to see why. The undercarriage compartment of a plane is equipped with neither heating, oxygen nor pressure, all of which are crucial for survival as the altitude rises.
At 18,000ft (5,490m), experts say, hypoxia will set in, causing weakness, tremors, light-headedness and visual impairment. By 22,000ft (6,710m) the stowaway will struggle to maintain consciousness as their blood oxygen level drops. Above 33,000ft (10,065m) the lungs require artificial pressure to function normally.
At the same time, hypothermia is likely to be brought on, with temperatures dropping as low as -63C (-81F).
Those stowaways whose bodies are not mangled by the retracting landing gear or killed by these extreme conditions will almost certainly be unconscious by the time the compartment doors re-open a few thousand feet above ground, causing them to plunge to their deaths.
"They either get crushed or frozen to death," says aviation expert David Learmount, of Flight International magazine.
"There's a huge degree of ignorance. If anyone knew what they were letting themselves in for they wouldn't do it."
Some stowaways have survived. They tend to have travelled fairly short distances, but all rely more on luck than judgement.
In 2010 a 20-year-old Romanian survived a flight from Vienna to Heathrow stowed in the undercarriage, but only because the private jet flew below 25,000ft due to bad weather.
In 2000 Fidel Maruhi Tahiti survived the 4,000-mile journey from Tahiti to Los Angeles and, two years later, Victor Alvarez Molina made it from Cuba to Canada alive. But all suffered severe hypothermia.
With such a low survival rate, the obvious question is why anyone would embark on such a high-risk journey.
A handful of stowaways appear to have done so as a prank or out of a misguided sense of adventure. In 2010, the body of 16-year-old American Delvonte Tisdale was found on the flight path to Boston's Logan airport after he apparently hid in the wheel well of a US Airways Boeing 737 from Charlotte, North Carolina.
But such cases are exceptional. The overwhelming majority of cases involve individuals from developing countries attempting to make their way to Europe or North America.
They are also almost exclusively male - despite International Labour Organisation figures suggesting women made up 49.6% of all migrants worldwide in 2005.
Since records began in 1947, 96 wheel well stowaways are thought to have attempted to board 85 flights
73 of those stowaways died and 23 survived
BBC
No-one saw the body fall from the sky on to Portman Avenue.
A few neighbours thought they heard something, a thud or a loud bang. But not a soul was around to witness a man hit the pavement of this quiet residential street in Mortlake, south-west London, early on a bright September Sunday.
Police say the death is being treated as unexplained. But early media reports all shared the same assumption - that he had stowed away in the landing gear of a plane flying to Heathrow, less than 10 miles away.
"He must have come down pretty much vertically to miss the parked cars," says John Taylor, 79, who heard a thump from his home across the street in this placid, affluent suburb. "I expect he was dead already. Poor chap must have been desperate."
Flowers mark the spot where a body was found in Mortlake It is not the first incident of this kind on the Heathrow flightpath.
In 2001, the body of Mohammed Ayaz, a 21-year-old Pakistani, was found in the car park of a branch of Homebase in nearby Richmond. Four years prior to that, another hidden passenger fell from the undercarriage of a plane on to a gasworks close to the store.
Others turned up at Heathrow itself. On 24 August, just 16 days before the discovery on Portman Ave, the remains of another man were found in the landing gear bay of a Boeing 747 after it touched down from a 6,000-mile flight from Cape Town. The bodies of two boys, thought to be as young as 12, were discovered in the undercarriage of a Ghana Airways flight from Accra in 2002.
Dr Stephen Veronneau, of the US Federal Aviation Administration, has identified 96 individuals around the world who have tried to travel in plane wheel wells since 1947. The incidents happened on 85 flights. Veronneau is working on the assumption that the Mortlake fatality was a stowaway.
Of these, more than three-quarters have proved fatal.
It isn't difficult to see why. The undercarriage compartment of a plane is equipped with neither heating, oxygen nor pressure, all of which are crucial for survival as the altitude rises.
At 18,000ft (5,490m), experts say, hypoxia will set in, causing weakness, tremors, light-headedness and visual impairment. By 22,000ft (6,710m) the stowaway will struggle to maintain consciousness as their blood oxygen level drops. Above 33,000ft (10,065m) the lungs require artificial pressure to function normally.
At the same time, hypothermia is likely to be brought on, with temperatures dropping as low as -63C (-81F).
Those stowaways whose bodies are not mangled by the retracting landing gear or killed by these extreme conditions will almost certainly be unconscious by the time the compartment doors re-open a few thousand feet above ground, causing them to plunge to their deaths.
"They either get crushed or frozen to death," says aviation expert David Learmount, of Flight International magazine.
"There's a huge degree of ignorance. If anyone knew what they were letting themselves in for they wouldn't do it."
Some stowaways have survived. They tend to have travelled fairly short distances, but all rely more on luck than judgement.
In 2010 a 20-year-old Romanian survived a flight from Vienna to Heathrow stowed in the undercarriage, but only because the private jet flew below 25,000ft due to bad weather.
In 2000 Fidel Maruhi Tahiti survived the 4,000-mile journey from Tahiti to Los Angeles and, two years later, Victor Alvarez Molina made it from Cuba to Canada alive. But all suffered severe hypothermia.
With such a low survival rate, the obvious question is why anyone would embark on such a high-risk journey.
A handful of stowaways appear to have done so as a prank or out of a misguided sense of adventure. In 2010, the body of 16-year-old American Delvonte Tisdale was found on the flight path to Boston's Logan airport after he apparently hid in the wheel well of a US Airways Boeing 737 from Charlotte, North Carolina.
But such cases are exceptional. The overwhelming majority of cases involve individuals from developing countries attempting to make their way to Europe or North America.
They are also almost exclusively male - despite International Labour Organisation figures suggesting women made up 49.6% of all migrants worldwide in 2005.
Since records began in 1947, 96 wheel well stowaways are thought to have attempted to board 85 flights
73 of those stowaways died and 23 survived
BBC
