How often do plane stowaways fall from the sky?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19562101

by quonn • 14 years ago

56 51 14 years ago

bbc.co.uk

MattRogish• 14 years ago

Wheel-well stowaway is just about the worst thing you can do, ever. The wheel-wells are unpressurized, unheated, and designed to snugly fit the wheels in there (airplane designers don't waste space!). If you're not crushed to death upon retraction then you're almost certainly going to freeze to death or die of hypoxia. Just don't do it.

astrodust4• 14 years ago

Hitching a ride on a boat full of drug-running pirates is actually safe by comparison.

colanderman• 14 years ago

But actually preventing someone slipping into the undercarriage depends on checks and procedures that are not always present, Shanks warns.

"In a lot of places around the world, the control of movement and airside control areas is not the same as what we have here."

"It's much easier in some locations to access the airside areas than it is in the UK. The only way it could be prevented is if the rest of the world tightened their procedures."

I would think the obvious solution would be to slap a big old multilingual warning sign on the wheel wells, clearly stating "flying in wheel wells WILL result in death by asphyxiation, hypothermia, and severe physical trauma".

ZoFreX2• 14 years ago

This really shows up how much of our security is theatre - if people can get into the wheel well of a flight landing at Heathrow there's very little stopping someone putting a bomb there. Yet legitimate, paying travellers have to jump through all the hoops.

pvarangot• 14 years ago

The guy most likely got into the wheel in another less secure airport, and fell near heathrow when the plane was preparing for landing.

njharman• 14 years ago

I did not see statistics on # of people stopped, # of people who were deterred, and less than a 100 succeeded in hundreds of thousands of flights.

Attempting to stop people or bombs in under carriage would EXACTLY BE SECURITY THEATER. That is an overreaction to insignificant but recently hyped/fear mongered threat that results in no statistically significant reduction in risk. But, writes up good in the papers.

People thinking like you are why security theater can exist.

danielweber• 14 years ago

Keeping bombs out of the cargo bay is one of the things we seem to do very well, and has little to do with all the screenings we instituted since 9/11.

How many planes have been bombed by someone sneaking something into the wheel well?

astrodust4• 14 years ago

This presumes people this desperate and, at the same time, willing to undertake such a fool's errand would be literate. It would also have to be a very big sign to cover even half the languages spoken in India.

What might be better is having a camera or motion sensor in the wheel well that can look for surprise guests.

DanBC2• 14 years ago

I'd be interested to see graphic designers attempting to create suitable, er, designs / graphics / logos to warn of the danger.

adambyrtek• 14 years ago

I bet this would be as successful as warnings on packs of cigarettes.

ChuckMcM3• 14 years ago

It is a sad thing when someone is so desperate that they will attempt this. Its a stupid thing when someone who watched a movie thinks this is actually possible and tries to re-create it on a lark. Maybe a message that said "Be sure to clean off the dead people who try to stow away here." So that people attempting it would realize they were in fact already dead.

Even with a canister of oxygen, at 35,000 feet you can't breath if you aren't in a pressure suit. Just doesn't work that way.

pdx4• 14 years ago

    Even with a canister of oxygen, at 35,000 feet you can't 
    breath if you aren't in a pressure suit.

Why not?

brianchu• 14 years ago

Did you read the article?

"At 18,000ft (5,490m), experts say, hypoxia will set in, causing weakness, tremors, light-headedness and visual impairment...Above 33,000ft (10,065m) the lungs require artificial pressure to function normally."

ChuckMcM3• 14 years ago

Your lungs need a minimum density of air in order for the gas to pass into your blood. If you can't maintain that air density you 'outgas' only. It won't kill you immediately (you can actually survive in a complete vacuum for example) until the existing oxygen in your system runs out, then its game over.

refurb3• 14 years ago

Partial pressures.

You can breath at 35,000 ft without a pressured suit, but go much higher and you can't.

At sea level, you have 760 mmHg of air pressure. Oxygen is 21% of the air mixture, so you have a partial O2 pressure of 160 mmHg.

At 35,000 ft, air pressure is 179 mmHg [1], so if you breath 100% pure oxygen, you're getting the same amount of oxygen you'd get at sea level.

Go up to 50,000 ft and the air pressure is only 83 mmHg, so even breathing 100% oxygen, you're only getting 50% of the oxygen you'd get at sea level.

[1] http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/air-altitude-pressure-d_46...

astrodust4• 14 years ago

More information on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_suit

It seems to be that above 40,000 feet that the oxygen you're taking in can't be absorbed if the air you're breathing isn't sufficiently pressurized. Decompression sickness will be your biggest problem.

SeanDav• 14 years ago

I was watching a documentary about a group of doctors doing high altitude research while climbing Mt Everest. It was claimed in that documentary that breathing pure oxygen only increases actual oxygen intake by 5% at those sort of altitudes.

Presumably they were talking about conventional oxygen masks and not the tight fitting, high pressure masks that pilots use.

In any case I was fairly shocked that breathing pure oxygen made such a small difference at altitude, but the difference it does make can be critical at the limits of human endurance.