4,800-mile stowaway clings to plane for three flights
Flight’s route from Kenya
A TEENAGE stowaway has survived three flights at altitudes of up to 38,000ft after clinging on to the landing gear of a plane.
The Kenyan 16-year-old had travelled 4,800 miles when he was found lying on the ground with just mild hypothermia at Maastricht Aachen airport in the Netherlands.
Some 24 hours earlier, he had smuggled himself on to a freight plane at Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International airport – staying on the Turkish Airlines Airbus A330 as it made stops in Istanbul, Turkey, and London Stansted.
‘For us, it is a miracle,’ Marvin Engh, a spokesman for the Dutch
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police, told The Times. ‘Usually, when someone stows away like this, they die because of the cold or a lack of oxygen.’
And a spokesman for Maastricht Aachen airport said: ‘He had tremendous luck to get through this. Stowaways on aeroplanes are rare and most people sadly don’t survive the journey.’
The unnamed boy, who has said he is seeking asylum, is recovering in hospital, according to police.
He had no ID but his family is being traced and any links to people trafficking gangs investigated.
Sneaking on to a plane’s landing gear is fraught with deadly risks – including being crushed as wheels retract, freezing to death in temperatures as low as -60C and lungs collapsing in low oxygen.
In 2019, a stowaway fell from a Kenya Airways jet heading to Heathrow, his body landing on the patio of a south London house.