A teenager was discovered alive after hiding on the landing gear of an airplane that traveled from Kenya to the Netherlands, surviving sub-zero temperatures for several hours.
The 16-year-old is reportedly a native of Kenya and is believed to have boarded the plane in Nairobi, although it is unclear how he managed to board.
The freighter is believed to have taken off from Nairobi on Wednesday. It appears that he stopped in Istanbul and at Stansted airport in the UK, before arriving at Maastricht airport on Thursday afternoon.
The boy, who was not identified, was discovered by officials at Maastricht airport shortly after the plane landed. He was taken to the hospital with severe hypothermia, but now it looks like he’s fine.
A spokesman for London’s Stansted airport told the Guardian that there was no suggestion that anything untoward had happened at Stansted and that the stowaway was already on board when the plane arrived at the airport.
Dutchman Royal Marechaussee, a police arm of the Dutch armed forces, is investigating whether the teenager was smuggled on board the aircraft by human traffickers, the Telegraph reported.
A spokesman for Maastricht Aachen airport said the boy was very lucky to be alive. “He was tremendously lucky to get over it,” he told Netherlands News Live.
With commercial flights reaching altitudes of around 38,000 feet, the chances of stowaway survival are minimal. Stowaways who try to hide on the aircraft’s landing gear usually die of cold or die from lack of oxygen.
In 2015, the body of a stowaway fell from the landing gear of an airplane traveling from Johannesburg to London on the roof of an office building in West London. Another man spent six months in the hospital after clinging to the structure of the jumbo jet during the 10-hour flight, surviving low temperatures.
The survivor, who now goes by the name of Justin, told the Guardian in December that he thought it was worth it.
“Because of my situation, and what I was going through, it was the only choice I had to survive,” he said.