Pretty incredible stuff. He travelled on the aeroplane’s wing for two hours and endured temperatures down to -50C. He now has acute frostbite. I’m surprised that he wasn’t killed.
Actually, he rode inside, not “on” the wing, inside the landing ear well, allegedly.
This account seems doubtful to me, since cruising at ~10Km is cruising at ~6 miles, which is cruising near ~30-something-thousand-feet, which is usually fatal without some sort of acclimation process, unless that plane pressurizes its landing gear wells.
I call bullshit.
The story quotes him as saying, “Eventually, I decided to climb up the landing gear into the wing. When I was in, I sat down there on a tyre and fell asleep.”
Wouldn’t the tire be on the GROUND, not inside the wing?
And, since when is there room in a landing gear well for anything more than the landing gear?
It’s dubious, but not because there isn’t room in the gear bay. It’s happened before. What makes the story a little odd for me is simply that he survived for two hours at -25C or so, at 30,000 feet.
The other cases (I’ll try to get references if anyone cares, I’m working from memory here) were of adults who were attempting to flee their countries to claim asylum somewhere else. In every case I can recall (just a few, total) it was a corpse that was found on landing.
I have a vague recollection of the story of two men who tried to leave Brazil using this method.
Didn’t one guy die when he fell out of the cavity created when then the landing gear was extended (If he wasn’t dead already…). The second guy survived: -40c in a t-shirt, at 35,000 ft for hours. An amazing story, if true. I can remember little else…
There is some room, not a lot, straight above the landing gear on a 737. That would be the only place he could have been and not been crushed when the gear was retracted.