Stowaway survives flight to Amsterdam in wheel bay of cargo plane

Dutch police said that they had found a 22-year-old Kenyan man in the front wheel section of a cargo plane that landed in Amsterdam on Sunday morning after flying from Johannesburg via Nairobi, Kenya.

First Lt. Mike Hofman said in an email Monday that after the man was found, officials discovered that he was still breathing. A medical helicopter arrived to provide care, and the man, who has not been named, is currently in the hospital and able to communicate, Hofman said.

It is rare that stowaways survive flights because of the low oxygen levels in wheel storage compartments and the extreme cold as the aircraft climbs to cruising altitude. In the past five years, Dutch authorities have discovered seven stowaways in the Netherlands. Two survived, according to Hofman.

Robert van Kapel, a spokesperson for the Dutch military police, said Monday that police were conducting an investigation into the man’s circumstances, and whether his trip constituted an illegal crossing of borders and whether it was a case of human smuggling.

Van Kapel said that the man has asked for asylum but that he did not know on what grounds.

“We of course see that a lot of people try to enter Europe for a better life,” van Kapel said.

“We see it every day, not only in airports but also in ports and highways.”

He said it was likely that the man boarded the plane in Nairobi, where it stopped on its way to Amsterdam from Johannesburg. Officials were also seeking to determine whether the man got help boarding the plane, he said.

There have been other instances in recent years of stowaways boarding flights to Europe and the United States, in some cases to escape circumstances in their home countries. In 2019, the body of a man believed to have been a stowaway on a plane bound for London from Nairobi plunged from the plane and landed in the backyard of a house, landing 3 feet away from a sunbather.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said that between 1947 and November 2021, it recorded 132 people who had tried to hide in the wheel wells or other areas of commercial aircraft worldwide. Of those people, 102, or about 77 per cent, died, said Rick Breitenfeldt, a FAA spokesperson.

Temperatures in wheel bays can drop to as low as -65 C for flights that reach cruising altitudes of 40,000 feet, according to a separate study on stowaways by the FAA.