A stowaway who hardly survived a flight to Paris from Algeria was discovered in the landing gear of an aircraft on Thursday.
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 midmorning, prosecutors told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
He had no ID on him, and was taken to hospital in a serious condition, they said.
An airport source earlier reported that the man "was alive but in a life-threatening condition because of severe hypothermia."
Commercial aircraft cruise at 30,000 to 40,000 feet altitude where temperatures typically drop to around minus 50 degrees Celsius (minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit), and a lack of oxygen makes survival unlikely for anyone traveling in a landing gear compartment that is neither heated nor pressurized.
According to U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) data cited in media, 132 people – known in the industry as wheel-well stowaways – tried 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.
Four months earlier, two passengers were found dead on arrival in the landing gear storage space of a flight between Santiago de Chile and Bogota.
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 mortality rate for people attempting to travel this way is 77%, according to the FAA figures.
