A body has been found on a London rooftop that UK police believe is the corpse of a man who tried to stow away on an international flight — and fell off the plane.
The man is believed to have been staying in the undercarriage of a plane arriving from Johannesburg, South Africa. After a journey of 8,000 miles, however, he apparently fell out just a few miles from Heathrow Airport, landing on the roof of a four-story office building in the wealthy Richmond neighborhood. Another stowaway actually survived and was found still inside the landing gear when the flight landed. He has been hospitalized.
Authorities are still investigating the death, and it is unclear whether it was the 1,400-foot fall that killed the man, or if he was already dead from the extreme elements experienced as a stowaway. Landing gear compartments on aircraft aren’t climate-controlled, meaning the stowaway would have experienced temperatures of about -76 degrees Fahrenheit on the 12 hour flight. Even if he was alive, the man would also almost certainly have passed out from lack of oxygen, which may help explain how he tumbled from the landing gear as it prepared to land.
This actually isn’t the first time a failed stowaway has rained down on the rooftops of London. In 2012, a man hiding on a flight from Angola made landfall in the streets of the city’s Westlake neighborhood. That investigation concluded he was already “dead or nearly dead” when he hit the ground.
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