Stowaway

For other uses, see Stowaway (disambiguation).

A shipping container in which 22 stowaways were found in the Port of Seattle

A stowaway is a person who secretly boards a vehicle, such as an aircraft, bus, ship, cargo truck or train, to travel without paying and without being detected.

Stowaways face dangerous situations. Since they are not legally on board, they must sometimes spend days without water or food when traveling by ship, risking death. A much greater risk of death is taken when trying to board an aircraft. Usually, a stowaway tries to jump into an aircraft by hanging on to the airliner's landing gear as the plane takes off, and the force of the wind can easily make a stowaway fall to his or her death. Because people flying on aircraft as stowaways must stay within the landing gear area, they face other risks, such as being crushed in a confined space when the gears retract, falling when the plane is landing, or dying from the heat produced by the engines of the aircraft. Deaths from hypothermia, caused by the extreme cold at high altitudes, or anoxia (lack of oxygen) are also possible and probable.

FAA spokesman Ian Gregor said in 2007, that since 1947, there have been 74 known airplane stowaway attempts worldwide. Only 14 of the individuals survived.

Stowaways also risk imprisonment, as it is illegal in most jurisdictions to embark on aircraft, boats or trains as stowaways. Airports, sea ports and train stations are typically marked as "No Trespassing" or "Private Property" zones to anyone but customers and employees. Seaports, train stations, and airports often attempt further security by designating restricted areas with signs saying "Authorized Personnel Only".

There are several different reasons for which a person might try to become a stowaway, among them free transport and illegal immigration. Some also become stowaways as a dare or a way to get a thrill.

Since the September 11 attacks, it has become more difficult to be a stowaway on board transportation arriving to or departing from the United States. Airport security has dramatically increased, and among the new security measures is watching over the fences from which stowaways usually gain entrance to an airport's runway. Among refugees seeking passage to America, stowing away on an American-flagged ship can be an effective and comfortable way to gain entry into the United States, due to the strict humanitarian codes observed on American vessels.

Incidents

At sea

• A man named Furness was a stowaway on the Queen Bee that left London on 21 April 1877 and ran aground at Farewell Spit, New Zealand on 6 August 1877.
• Perce Blackborow was a stowaway on Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance on the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. He was found after 3 days and was later signed onto the crew.
• Averill Wanchove, a 25-year-old seamstress was a stowaway on the Empire Windrush in June 1948.

• In 1992, crew members of the cargo ship McRuby discovered a group of nine African stowaways aboard and murdered eight of them. Ghanaian Kingsley Ofosu was the lone member of the group to escape the massacre. His story was dramatized in the 1996 television movie Deadly Voyage.

By air

Clarence Terhune to the left of Theodor von Guérard, the Reichsjustizminister

• 19-year-old Clarence Terhune hid himself on board the LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin airship in 1928, becoming the first stowaway to fly across the ocean.

• On 4 June 1969, Armando Socarras Ramirez and Jorge Perez Blanco climbed into the right landing gear well of an Iberia DC-8, Flight 904 from Havana, Cuba to Madrid, Spain. Socarras survived the flight with severe shock and exposure. Initially it was thought Perez fell from the aircraft during flight, either during a secondary retraction to clear a warning light, or during landing preparation as Socarras indicated he spoke to Perez during some duration of the flight. Later he claimed that Perez attempted to climb into the left well, failed and believes Perez is in a Cuban prison.

• In 1970, Keith Sapsford, a 14-year-old boy, died after falling from the wheel-well of a Tokyo-bound Japan Air Lines DC-8 taking off from the Kingsford Smith Airport at Sydney, Australia.

• On 28 July 1999, Yaguine Koita and Fodé Tounkara were stowaways who froze to death flying from Conakry, Guinea, to Brussels, Belgium. Their bodies were later discovered in the aircraft's wheel bay. The boys were carrying a letter, written in imperfect French, which was widely published in the world media.

• On 12 August 2000, Roberto Viza Egües hid himself in an Air France cargo container in Havana, Cuba and arrived in Paris, France the following day suffering from exposure but otherwise in good condition. France eventually denied his application for asylum based on lack of evidence of persecution and deported him back to Cuba.

• On August 5 2000, an unidentified Tahitian man was discovered in the wheel well of Air France flight 71 in Los Angeles that originated in French Polynesia and was to go on to Paris. The man spent seven hours inside the unheated and unpressurized landing gear at 38,000 feet and survived temperatures of −50 °F (−46 °C) below zero. His body temperature registered 79 °F (26 °C), which can be fatal, and he was taken to UCLA medical center where he recovered fully. He was flown back to Tahiti under orders from the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

• On 24 December 2000, 16-year-old Maikel Almira and 15-year-old Alberto Rodriguez climbed into the wheel wells of a British Airways Boeing 777 in Havana, Cuba. Almira's body was found in a field five miles from Gatwick airport in England. Rodriguez's body fell from the aircraft the following day as it departed for a flight to Cancún, Mexico. Almira had left a note for his mother indicating he was going to the United States, however tragically the departure of a Miami bound flight had been delayed and the flight to Gatwick took over its take off slot.

• On June 8, 2005, the remains of a stowaway were found inside the wheel well of a South African Airways aircraft when it landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport, arriving from Johannesburg via Dakar, Senegal.

• On January 28, 2007, a 17-year-old male from Cape Town, South Africa was found in the wheel well of a British Airways flight in Los Angeles, CA. He had died from exposure as a stowaway on a previous flight and the body had not been immediately found. That flight had last been in Cape Town five days earlier, on January 23, 2007.

• On July 19, 2007, maintenance workers at San Francisco International Airport found a dead man in the nose gear wheel well of a United Airlines Boeing 747 arriving from Shanghai after an 11-hour trip. The man, who appeared to be Asian and in his 50s, had few obvious injuries and was wearing several layers of clothing, including two jackets.

• On October 11, 2007 A man known as Osama R.M. Shublaq was reported to have been a stowaway aboard Singapore Airlines Flight 119. The flight, which took off from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia at around 10:56 PM, arrived in Singapore.

• On July 3, 2009 The body of a man was found in the undercarriage of a jet traveling from Ghana to Britain.

• On August 9, 2009, the body of 19-year-old Filipp Vitaliyevich Yurchenko from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky was discovered in the landing gear bay of an Airbus A320 aircraft after the flight from Irkutsk to Vladivostok, Russia. According to experts, the man had been dead for at least five days.

• On December 26, 2009, Habib Hussain (25) from Moradabad in Uttar Pradesh, India who was working at Medina airport, Saudi Arabia, with a Saudi ground handling company, entered the plane which returned to Jaipur, Rajasthan from Medina, and hid in the toilet. Habib’s presence came to light after the Air India flight took off from Medina when a passenger went to the toilet. Air India sources said he got into the plane on the pretense of cleaning it. Crew members handed him over to immigration officials at Jaipur Airport. During questioning, it was ascertained that Habib, an Indian national, was fleeing Saudi Arabia, where his passport had been confiscated, and he was forced to work as a bonded labourer.

• On February 8, 2010, a body was discovered in the landing gear compartment of the Delta Air Lines flight which arrived in Tokyo from New York. A mechanic found the body inside one of the wheel wells of a Boeing aircraft during maintenance. The man, who was of dark complexion and dressed only in blue jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, was carrying no passport or personal belongings, police say. He was possibly a stowaway and probably froze to death, they added.

• On February 18, 2010, the body of an apparent stowaway fell from the wheel well of a plane taking off from the Dominican Republic. The 767 aircraft — Amerijet flight 840 — landed about two hours later without incident at Miami International Airport. The flight originated in Santo Domingo.

• On June 9th, 2010, a 20-year-old Romanian stowaway survived a flight from Vienna to Britain in the undercarriage of a Boeing 747 owned by a wealthy Arab sheik. The man, whose name is believed to be Andrei Culea stated that he had crawled “under the wire” of the Schwechat airport’s perimeter fence and climbed into the undercarriage of the parked aircraft with no idea where the aircraft was heading. He was taken into custody at Heathrow airport, where he reportedly fell out of the landing gear undercarriage. Paramedics checked him over, but he had suffered only minor injuries. It was reported he only survived because the jet flew at a lower cruising altitude of 33,000 ft (rather than the standard 37,000 ft) because of poor weather. He was cautioned by police and freed with no further action being taken.

• On January 15, 2011, Qasim Siddique, a ninth grade student from Lahore fell to death from an Air Blue flight headed for Dubai which had taken off from Allama Iqbal International Airport, Lahore. His body was found on the rooftop of a house located close to the airport. Reportedly, the residents of Street 5 in Al Faisal Colony, Lahore heard a loud bang as Qasim fell to his death between 9:10 and 9:15 pm. The captain of the flight had contacted the control room immediately after take-off and reported a malfunction while closing the plane's wheels, air traffic control sources said, informing the controllers a few minutes later that the problem had been rectified. The postmortem of Qasim confirmed that he fell to his death. Police are still investigating the case which involves another missing boy who was friend of Qasim.

• On June 24, 2011, a man with dual citizenship from the US and Nigeria boarded a flight departing from New York's JFK airport using an expired boarding pass and no valid ID, the same man tried to board a flight from LAX to Atlanta a few days later, again, with an expired boarding pass and no valid ID, he was detained by the FBI, and charged with being a stowaway on an aircraft

• On April 17 2012, a stowaway was found at Toronto's Pearson International Airport. Charges since then have been laid by the Greater Toronto Airport Authority (GTAA).

Instances in film

• In Airport, Ada Quonsett (Helen Hayes) is a sneaky elderly stowaway aboard an airplane that has a suicidal bomber among its passengers. She was honored with the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.
• In Stowaway to the Moon, a television film that originally aired on CBS in 1975 and stars Lloyd Bridges and Michael Link, an 11-year-old child, who has been fascinated by space and astronauts, wishes that he could go into space also.

See also

• Deadly Voyage
• Freighthopping
• Human mail

External links

• References for the original study of wheel well stowaways by Veronneau et al. in 1996
• Aviat Space Environ Med. 1996 Aug;67(8):784-6
• The 1996 study was updated and published by The Flight Safety Foundation in 1997