Kenya teen found alive in plane's landing gear

Stowaway in hospital with hypothermia

LONDON • A teenage boy has been found alive after stowing away in the landing gear of an aircraft that travelled from Nairobi to Holland, via Turkey and Britain.

The 16-year-old, who is understood to be from Kenya, was discovered by ground staff at Maastricht Airport in the Netherlands shortly after the Airbus plane touched down on Thursday afternoon.

Remarkably he appears to have survived the entire 8,000-km journey but was taken to hospital suffering from severe hypothermia.

Officials in Holland were Friday night trying to establish where and how he managed to board the aircraft, which was an Airbus A330 Freighter.

It is thought that the flight, which was operated by Turkish Airlines, was a cargo aircraft that had departed from Nairobi on Wednesday bound for Istanbul.

From there it flew to Stansted Airport in Essex before departing for its final destination of Maastricht.

With commercial aircraft flying at altitudes of 38,000 feet, stowaways who hide in the landing gear often freeze to death or die because of the lack of oxygen.

In some cases they also fall from the aircraft when the plane comes into land and the wheels are lowered.

A spokesman for Stansted Airport said the plane in question had originally departed from Nairobi and there was nothing to suggest the teenager had boarded the aircraft in the U.K.

One theory is that the boy had managed to stow away inside the aircraft for the first leg of the journey, but had got into the landing gear at Stansted. The 400-km flight to Maastricht would have been at a lower altitude making conditions more survivable. But aviation experts have said that it is still miraculous he has made it.

A spokesman for Maastricht Aachen Airport said the boy was fortunate to have survived the journey. He told Netherland News Live: “He had tremendous luck to get through this.”

The Dutch Royal Marechaussee — a police branch of the Netherlands' armed forces — said it was investigating whether the teenager had been smuggled aboard the aircraft as part of a human trafficking conspiracy.

The teenager, who has not been named, was said to be doing well in hospital in Maastricht while efforts were being made to contact his family back in Kenya.

In 2019 a suspected stowaway fell from a Kenyan Airways flight into a south London garden as it came into land at Heathrow.

The body of the man landed just a metre away from a resident who had been sunbathing at the time.

A similar incident took place in 1997 when the body of a young man was found hanging in the nose-wheel bay of a British Airways flight from Nairobi after it landed at Gatwick Airport.