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A teenage boy has been discovered alive after stowing away in the landing gear of a plane which travelled from Kenya to the Netherlands, surviving sub-zero temperatures for several hours.
The 16-year-old boy is understood to be from Kenya and thought to have boarded the plane in Nairobi, although it is not clear how he managed to get on board.
The cargo aircraft is thought to have departed from Nairobi on Wednesday. It is understood to have stopped in Istanbul and at Stansted airport in the UK before arriving at Maastricht airport on Thursday afternoon.
The boy, who has not been named, was discovered by staff at Maastricht airport shortly after the plane touched down. He was taken to hospital with severe hypothermia, but is now understood to be doing well.
A spokesperson for London Stansted airport told the Guardian that there was no suggestion that anything untoward occurred at Stansted, and that the stowaway was thought to already have been on board when the plane arrived at the airport.
The Dutch Royal Marechaussee, a police branch of the Netherlands’ armed forces, is investigating whether the teenager had been smuggled aboard the aircraft by human traffickers, the Telegraph reported.
A spokesperson for Maastricht Aachen airport said that the boy was extremely fortunate to be alive. “He had tremendous luck to get through this,” he told Netherlands News Live.
With commercial flights reaching altitudes of about 38,000ft, chances of survival for stowaways are slim. Stowaways who attempt to hide in the landing gear of planes often freeze to death, or die due to a lack of oxygen.
In 2015, the body of a stowaway fell from the undercarriage of a plane travelling from Johannesburg to London on to the roof of a west London office building. Another man spent six months in hospital after clinging to the undercarriage of the jumbo jet during the 10-hour flight, surviving freezing 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 that I had to survive,” he said.
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