A 13-year-old Afghan boy reportedly survived a flight from Kabul to Delhi stowed away in the rear landing gear compartment of a passenger aircraft, according to multiple media reports including the BBC, CNN and Indian outlets.
According to the BBC, authorities found the child, who is from Kunduz city in northern Afghanistan, roaming around the runway in white pajamas at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport after the KAM Airlines flight landed on Sunday.
Security forces detained the boy and reportedly questioned him for several hours before sending him back to Kabul at about 4 p.m. local time, according to a statement from India’s Central Industrial Security Force (CISF), obtained by the Indian Express newspaper.
Global News has not independently verified the reports.
He allegedly told authorities he stowed himself away out of curiosity, the BBC said, citing Indian authorities.
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A spokesperson for the CISF was quoted as saying that the child made the journey unnoticed and that, upon inspection, a small audio device was recovered from the landing gear.
“An aircraft security check was conducted by the airline’s security and engineering staff, during which a small red-coloured audio speaker was found in the rear landing gear area,” CISF said in that report.
According to the Indian outlet, the boy intended to fly to Tehran, Iran, and was unaware that the 90-minute, 1,000-kilometre flight was bound for Delhi.
To board the flight, the boy reportedly snuck into Kabul airport, blended in with a group of passengers, and hid in the plane’s rear wheel well, carrying only the red speaker with him.
Hiding in a plane’s wheel well poses several life-threatening risks, including being crushed.
Other risks, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, include hypoxia resulting from low oxygen levels, hypothermia and frostbite due to cold outside temperatures, and falling when the landing gear retracts.
A 2011 Federal Aviation Administration study found that approximately 80 per cent of people who stow away in plane wheel wells or other external compartments die due to low oxygen levels and freezing temperatures at high altitudes.
In January, two people were discovered dead in the wheel well compartment of a JetBlue Airways plane that landed in Florida.
It was the second such incident in weeks after a dead body was found in a wheel well of a United Airlines plane in Hawaii on Christmas Eve last year, after it flew from Chicago.
Last November, surveillance footage captured a Russian national who successfully boarded a flight to France from JFK International Airport in New York, despite slipping past security.
The footage, provided by the Port Authority of New York, showed Svetlana Dali eluding gate agents checking boarding passes for the Delta Air Lines flight and also going through security undetected earlier in the day, despite being screened and getting patted down.
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