A young man suffering from "severe hypothermia" was discovered at Paris-Orly airport in the landing gear of a flight from Algeria, the AFP agency learned this Thursday from sources in local authorities.
The man was discovered at the end of the morning in the landing gear of an Air Algérie plane, which arrived at Orly from Oran at 10:14 a.m., the Créteil prosecutor's office told AFP.
This is a person without identification documents and whose estimated age is between 20 and 30 years, according to the same source. He was transferred in serious condition to the Henri-Mondor hospital in Créteil, according to the prosecutor's office, specifying that the Air Transport Gendarmerie (GTA) was in charge of the investigation.
On Thursday morning, an airport source indicated that the young man was "alive but in absolute emergency due to severe hypothermia." The GTA confirmed to AFP a "seriously injured person" in Orly, without immediately providing further details.
The discovery occurred "between 10:30 and 11:00 a.m.", a priori during "technical checks" of the device, indicated a source close to the case, confirming that the man, who was "transported to a hospital for firefighters," "he was not dead.
Several cases of stowaways hiding in the landing gear of airplanes, an unheated or pressurized space, have made headlines in recent years.
In April, the body of a man was found in Amsterdam-Schiphol upon the arrival of a plane from Toronto (Canada), but it had apparently previously passed through Nigeria.
Four months earlier, two stowaway passengers, also deceased, had been discovered hiding in the storage space of the landing gear of a plane traveling from Santiago de Chile to Bogotá.
In July 2019, the frozen body of a man fell into a garden in a south-west London suburb, within a meter of a resident who was sunbathing. He had apparently fallen off the landing gear of a Kenya Airways plane while approaching nearby Heathrow Airport.
At the cruising altitude of commercial aircraft, 12 km, the air temperature drops below -50°C, while lack of oxygen can be fatal.
According to global statistics from the American Civil Aviation Authority (FAA) cited in January 2022 by the New York Times, between 1947 and 2021, 132 people attempted to travel clandestinely by hiding in aircraft landing gears.
One hundred and two of them died, a mortality rate of 77%, according to the same source.
