What’s amazing to me is that, according to that Wikipedia page, almost a quarter of wheel-well stowaways are successful!
Check out Wendell’s link. Apparently, there have been 106 attempts (that are known) and 25 of those were “successful,” as in the person survived. I’m shocked by those numbers.
A lot of those go back quite far though and they involve lower altitude planes like DC-3’s. That is completely plausible because they don’t fly that high. As long as you find a space in the wheel well and can hang on for the ride, you will be fine as long as you don’t get crushed. Altitude means everything and 14,000 feet is completely different from 35,000+ feet in terms of survival.
This one is quite different. The negative temperature of -70F alone should freeze anyone into a human popsickle in less than an hour. He wasn’t even wearing winter clothes. That is what happened in other cases when they found a pummeled and battered body far away from home but on the approach path to a major airport. They froze to death en route and then dropped like a cadaver bomb when the plane extended the gear for landing.
The altitude is the thing I don’t understand. Cabin depressurization at that altitude results in loss of consciousness in just a few seconds and death shortly thereafter. Payne Stewart’s Lear Jet suffered a depressurization and killed all aboard in 1999 before it crashed while running out of fuel on on autopilot. We are talking about a kid that went from sea level to well past the summit of Mt. Everest in just a few minutes and yet it didn’t kill him although it would the vast majority of people in lesser circumstances.
Maybe some teenagers really are nearly indestructible.
There was a news report on TV where they demonstrated exactly where in that wheelwell the kid could sit himself to avoid being crushed by the gear. With the door closed, they suggested there might be residual heat from the wheel and hydraulics to prevent freezing to death.
(This I wonder about the Malaysian flight - if the problem was a fire and depressurization, and the crew turned off the breakers due to a possible fire, the passengers had about 15 minutes of oxygen from the drop-down masks. If the plane continued flying at high altitude for several hours, would the cabin have dropped to ambient outside temperature? Would most passengers have died of hypoxia or frozen to death? Is it worse if they were at close to room temperature for a while with no oxygen, rather than going to a lower body temperature like the kid in the wheel well?)
Here’s a guy who made it 8 hours and 38,000 ft (!?) Yeah, I don’t get it either. Another guy, Fidel Maruhi, survived the 7.5 hr journey from Tahiti to LA.
If films are anything to go by, it would play out like this:
Stewardess: You’re not going out there are you?
Maverick: You got any better ideas?
Stewardess: No, I won’t let you.
Maverick: Just be ready to open that door for us.
<outside the plane>
Maverick: Timmy!! Give me your hand!
Timmy: I…can’t.
Maverick: Yes you can, just keep looking at me…'atta boy! I got you!
<back inside>
Stewardess: Are you out of your mind?!
Maverick: Probably.
<they kiss>
Here is a FAA report that concludes a perfect combo of hyperthermia and hypoxia puts them in a state of hibernation.
http://www.faa.gov/data_research/research/med_humanfacs/oamtechreports/1990s/media/AM96-25.pdf
But it is bullshit. -70 whilst laying on steel…frozen stiff.
It must stay much warmer in some of those wells than the FAA thinks. Like +10 degrees F. Then maybe the hypothermia + hypoxia hibernation thing makes sense.
Wiki also says some birds fly in the stratosphere. How do they live?
The crew does a walk around but you can be standing right next to the wheels and not see anything. most of the view is hidden. This is because not all the gear doors are open on the ground.
When a plane is landing all the gear doors open for wheel deployment. Then many of the doors close again for aerodynamic efficiencies. Otherwise there would be these huge barn doors sticking out creating a lot of drag. The end result is a wheel strut that is mostly enclosed on the ground. You can’t see most of the empty space when the plane is on the ground unless you crawled on top of the wheel.
What would be possible is a policy of extending the doors on the ground for inspection. I know we use to have them open on the old DC8’s but I don’t know why. I just know you didn’t want to be near one if the hydraulic pressure bled off because it would crush you like a bug. There was also a switch that if you grabbed onto it while climbing in would trigger the event. So it was a safety issue in that respect.
I’m beginning to imagine a very horrific alternate ending to Toy Story 2.
This is a different kind of flying, altogether.
Their respiratory systems are far, far more efficient than ours, allowing them to extract sufficient oxygen from the air.
They have nature’s own down coat for insulation
A metabolism that gives them a normal body temperature of around 103-104 helps offset heat loss.
A number of bird species regularly exposed to extreme cold have special blood vessel structures that warm up blood returning to their core, keeping vital organs in good working condition.
Hydraulic lines won’t provide any heat. The hydraulic pumps might but they don’t run that much while an airplane is in flight. In the factory we are limited to the amount of time we can actually run the pumps, they are designed for short term use. If one was to get next to the ceiling or aft wall of the wheel well, there could be some warmth there, those place are next to pressurized areas. But with all the wiring and other things, getting next to those areas would be pretty near impossible.
This is a picture of the left wheel well of a 737. The forward wall (to the right) has much of the hydraulic tubing used for flight controls along with what we call the Christmas tree, that controls the spoilers. On the left is the aft wall, getting anywhere near that would be extremely dangerous. The orange and black tube is part of the flap drive, it would have no problem wrapping body parts around it if one is too close. The tank on the left is the B system hydraulic reservoir. The only place for someone with the gear retracted would be on the keel beam, there would be about 16 inches between the bottoms of the tires.
The wheel well in the picture looks filthy compared to what I see in the factory.
Does the hydraulic reservoir get hot? Warm hydraulic lines were my friend when I worked on fishing boats…
Thank you. Steered me to this article.
http://people.eku.edu/ritchisong/birdcirculatory.html
Learn interesting things on this forum. Whales go a mile down, and birds go 7 miles up.
So, should the question be why don’t aircraft manufacturers build in spaces for passengers to safely travel in wheel wells?
Or at least a camera that instantly uploads the footage to YouTube.
This happened at SJC, so I read quite a bit about it. It turns out he was picked up by security cameras climbing the fence. However no one was looking at the screens at the time. Makes one feel real safe, doesn’t it?
IIRC he did not climb out of the well until two hours after landing in Hawaii, so he must have been out cold. You’d think the shock of landing would wake anyone up.
Brakes. The wheel brakes get pretty hot and could provide enough heat to keep you alive. If the taxi is longish and/or requires significant braking the brakes can be around 200°C. They cool down during the flight but the whole bay would be significantly warmer than the outside air temp would suggest it should be.
It’s almost as bad as coach.
I’m gonna ask a stupid question here - are we sure it was the wheel well and not the cargo hold or something?
I suspect they might notice if someone opened the door to the cargo hold. Maybe an indicator lamp in the cockpit or something. And I don’t know if you can securely close one of those from the inside. And all the news reports say it was the wheel well.