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| -Obits- |
| Aircraft landing gear stowaway does it wrong |
| 2010-02-08 |
| A body has been found inside the wheel-well of a Delta Air Lines plane after it landed in Tokyo from New York, and Japanese authorities are trying to identify the man. You're doing it wrong. You stow away to get to America (or Japan) from a third-world hellhole. What, couldn't afford the super saver rate or something? Heck it's less than a thousand bucks for EWR-NRT. They give you your own seat and everything. The police at Narita International Airport said that the body of the apparent stowaway was clad only in a long-sleeved plaid shirt and jeans. One of these times, the stowaway will remember to bring a parka and a box lunch. Police official Zenjiro Watanabe said on Monday that a mechanic had found the body lying inside the landing gear compartment of the Boeing 777-200 during maintenance after Delta Flight 59 had landed on Sunday night. Love that name, Zenjiro. Sounds like a carny cold-reading act. "All we know is that he must have sneaked in just before departure, because it is impossible for him to enter the storage during flight," Watanabe said. Yeah, would be hard to leap 38,000 feet up while the plane is over the Pacific ... Another wonderful breach of security at a U.S. airport. The police were trying to identify the man, Watanabe said. The man had no visible injuries except frostbite, and he might have died of hypothermia. Gee, you really think so, Muldoon? Nuttin' gets past Watanabe ... The police were investigating the case both as an accident and as a possible crime. The temperature in the plane's landing gear is known to fall to about minus 50°C during the long flight. My last flight over the pole and into Asia, I could feel how bitterly cold it was outside, even through the double-pane window. Looking down into Siberia, it looked like the most hostile place on Earth. Similar cases have occurred in the past. In 2007, a man was found dead in the nose-gear wheel-well of a United Airlines flight that arrived in San Francisco from Shanghai. He, too, was thought to have been a stowaway. See? That's the correct way to freeze to death in a jetliner landing gear. And the guy made the right decision to cut four extra hours off his flight by going west coast - Asia instead of all the way to JFK. |
| Posted by:gromky |
| #7 most of them wake up dead. I just hate it when that happens to me, it screws up your whole week. |
| Posted by: CrazyFool 2010-02-08 18:56 |
| #6 There actually was a case of a guy who stowed away in the wheelwell of a jetliner from Fiji. His body temperature was in the 80's when he arrived, and he was covered with grease (from the wheels, I guess). He survived and was shipped back to Fiji. It was on Discovery Health, on (I think) "Untold Stories of the ER." It was pretty interesting watching what they did to re-warm him. But yeah, his case was unusual - most of them wake up dead. |
| Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2010-02-08 18:41 |
| #5 But I thought the closer to the sun, the hotter it would be. And if they really cared, they should put emergency oxygen masks in those compartments - and heaters. - dead guy |
| Posted by: Goober Goobelopolous 2010-02-08 16:40 |
| #4 ...number of days before this is incorporated into another episode of CSI:NY? |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2010-02-08 16:38 |
| #3 One wonders how long he has been up there. |
| Posted by: CrazyFool 2010-02-08 14:57 |
| #2 The police were investigating the case both as an accident and as a possible crime. Put him in zeh koolar....... |
| Posted by: armyguy 2010-02-08 14:45 |
| #1 At 30,000 feet you will die from lack of oxygen before the hypothermia gets you. It's just so cold you won't notice you are dying until you ARE dead (OK, stretching things a bit). Landing gear compartments are NOT pressurized. There are worse ways to go. |
| Posted by: tipover 2010-02-08 14:06 |