When the weather is hot then you can just sit in your house, go to the beach or go sunbathing in your garden. Many people who go sunbathing in their gardens do it mainly because their garden is their own private place. What can go wrong in a warm day when you are sunbathing in your own private place? That is probably what the sunbathing man in London asked himself when he was in his garden in July, 2019.
It was a sunny, hot day in London and someone was enjoying the sun and having a good time, at least until someone fell from the sky one meter next to him. What seemed to be a nice day probably resulted in a trauma for the sunbathing man. The neighbor of the probably traumatized sunbathing man reported that he was downstairs and heard a loud sound. He went upstairs, drew the curtains and he saw someone lying on the ground with ‘all his clothes on and everything’. The neighbor also reported that his head was in a bad way and that there was blood on the walls. The neighbor went outside and immediately after he came out, his bloody neighbor also came out shaking. Now I’m pretty sure that he actually did get traumatized. Soon after the accident the body was taken away leaving only a trauma and a broken sidewalk to the sunbathing man.
After some research it was found that the man was a stowaway trying to get to london from Nairobi Airport, Kenya. He apparently wanted to go to London so much that he was ready to sit in the small space in the landing gear. The good news is that he did succeed to reach London like he wanted to and the bad bad news is that he did not survive it. He was a little bit prepared; he had brought water, food and a blanket. The blanket was apparently not warm enough because he was also frozen. Outside the plane temperatures can drop to minus 51 degrees centigrade. Assuming the plane was beginning its descent, the altitude he fell from was about 30,000 feet. It took him more than two minutes to fall to the ground. The man from Kenya fell on a sideway made of stone. The sideway made of concrete shattered to a lot of pieces. The neighbor of the sunbathing man said that if the landing gear was opened two seconds later, then the body would have fallen on a big crowd of people. If the pilots had extended the wheels of the airplane two seconds later and the body would have fallen on o huge crowd, then there would be a couple of fatalities because of the crash and there would be a lot of panic. Panic in these kinds of situations tends to be way more lethal.
Heathrow Airport has responded and it said that this happens ‘once in the five years’. That means each five years a stowaway falls from the landing gear. And that is considered normal?
The last time someone fell from a Heathrow flight from a landing gear was in 2012 that person had been a stowaway too.
However new evidence suggests that the man who fell from the landing gear was not a stowaway after all. After a further investigation the investigators came to the conclusion that the dead man was very likely an airport worker working in Nairobi Airport. The reason the investigators said this was that that dead person had access to strictly restricted and regulated airport areas. Or he was a very smart stowaway knowing how to get access to such areas or he was an airport worker doing his job. I think that the first one is likelier because if he had been that smart then he would have done something better against the cold temperatures. If he had been a airport worker which I consider very much likelier, then the first question I would ask is why?
If he had been an airport worker and had access to such restricted areas and working there, how could he not have known that it will get so cold if he was so specialized?
Here you can read an article on a news website.