Nairobi — A 16-year-old Kenyan teenage stowaway has survived freezing temperatures while clinging to the landing gear of a freight plane that flew from London to the Netherlands, Daily Mail reports.
The boy was found on Friday morning on a jet that landed at Maastricht Airport after crossing the North Sea from Stansted at 19,000 feet.
The teenager is lucky to be alive after a number of other people have frozen to death trying the same thing because of the sub-zero temperatures at high altitude.
In some cases people have died and fallen out either into the sea and in 2019 a stowaway fell from a Kenya Airways jet heading to Heathrow and was found on the patio of a Clapham garden.
The Dutch Royal Marechaussee – a police branch of the Netherlands’ armed forces -tweeted that they believe the stowaway is a 16-year-old boy from Kenya and that he is now in hospital with hypothermia. His identity was not immediately provided and authorities said they were investigating links to a human trafficking syndicate.
‘The presumably 16-year-old Kenyan boy is doing reasonably well,’ they added.
The flight in question is thought to have been a Turkish Airlines cargo flight operated by an Airbus A330.
Dutch aviation publication Luchtvaart Nieuws reported the only flight to land from London at Maastricht Saturday was TK6305, operated by a Turkish Airlines Airbus A330-200 freighter.
‘He had tremendous luck to get through this,’ a spokesman for Maastricht Aachen Airport told netherlandsnewslive. Stowaways on aeroplanes are rare, and most people sadly don’t survive the journey.
Most stowaways in the lower part of the wheel well either freeze to death or fall from hiding places during flight. Stansted has been asked to comment.