Desperation will drive people to do something insanely dangerous things. In proof of that statement, a stowaway was discovered barely alive within the undercarriage compartment of an Air Algeria aircraft at Paris Orly airport yesterday morning.
A security source familiar with the details of the incident told Reuters that the individual was found in a life-threatening, hypothermic condition, necessitating immediate medical intervention at a nearby hospital.
The aircraft in question had just traveled two-and-a-half hours from Oran, a town in western Algeria, to Paris. Fox News revealed that, while not yet formally identified, the stowaway is believed to be a man in his 20s, whom the crew stumbled upon during their technical checks.
Stowaways who secret themselves inside the unpressurized wheel-houses and cargo holds of planes are subject to extreme, often lethal, environmental conditions. Many don’t survive the journey.
With commercial jets flying at altitudes of 30,000 to 40,000 feet, such stowaways endure subzero temperatures of between -50° Celsius (-58° Fahrenheit) and -60° Celsius (-76° Fahrenheit), along with a serious deficit of breathable oxygen.
In a horrific 2019 incident, the lifeless body of a suspected stowaway fell hundreds of feet from an airborne plane and landed in the garden of an unsuspecting resident of southwest London, barely missing him as he sunbathed on the lawn.
In another such incident, which occurred in 2015, a stowaway fell from a British Airways plane toward the end of an 11-hour flight from Johannesburg to London’s Heathrow Airport. In this case, the victim’s body landed on the roof of a clothing company building in West London. Meanwhile, a second stowaway somehow survived the 8,000-mile journey after being found unconscious in the undercarriage of the same plane and treated at a London hospital.
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