Fidel Maruhi, who survived a wheel-well flight from Tahiti to Los Angeles in 2000, had a body temperature of 26 °C (79 °F), well below the level usually considered fatal, when emergency personnel began treating him on the runway. It is unknown how survivors did not perish to such extreme conditions.
The flight is far from the first to see a stowaway survive a perilous journey. In November, a 26-year-old man was found in a plane's landing gear compartment at Miami International Airport. Authorities said he had survived the 2-hour and 37-minute flight journey from Guatemala.
There are serious risks associated with the extreme conditions people face if they try to travel in the undercarriage of a plane. These include being crushed when landing gear retracts, frostbite, hearing loss, tinnitus and acidosis - the build-up of acid in body fluids which can cause coma or death.
A pressurized suit with thermal protection and an oxygen system could keep them safe for the flight, Kring suggests. An astronaut's suit might fit the bill: NASA suits can regulate temperature (hot or cold) by sending liquid through the system, keeping a body in homeostasis, as long as that body is safely on the wing.
One person successfully made it from Havana to Madrid. But most other attempts ended in death. According to the FAA—including this most recent incident—105 people have stowed away on 94 flights since 1947. Of those, 80 individuals died and 25 survived—that's a 23.8 percent survival rate.
Wheel wells of airplanes aren't pressurized, meaning that as the plane ascends, oxygen levels decrease, as do temperatures. At cruising altitude, ambient temperatures reach as low as -81 degrees F.
Tires are changed every 120 to 400 landings depending on a number of factors. Aircraft tires need to withstand an extremely wide range of temperatures that go from minus 60 degrees Celsius at an altitude of 10,000 meters to extremely high temperatures when landing in the world's hottest regions.
Nevertheless, a survey by the American magazine Time which examined 35 years of data on plane crashes found that the middle rear seats of an airplane had the lowest fatality rate: 28 per cent, compared to 44 per cent for the seats from the central aisle. It is also logical.
The middle seat in the final seat is your safest bet
The middle rear seats of an aircraft had the lowest fatality rate: 28%, compared to 44% for the middle aisle seats, according to a TIME investigation that examined 35 years' worth of aircraft accident data.
In the middle, at the back
Nonetheless, a TIME investigation that looked at 35 years of aircraft accident data found the middle rear seats of an aircraft had the lowest fatality rate: 28%, compared with 44% for the middle aisle seats. This logically makes sense too.
Surviving a Plane Crash
The first concern of a crash over the open ocean is, of course, surviving the plane crash itself. And the odds of surviving are surprisingly good. More than 95 percent of the airplane passengers involved in an airplane crash survive, according to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).
While stowaways on flights are rare, those who managed to sneak into an aircraft's wheel well will face freezing temperatures and low oxygen levels, increasing their risk of hypothermia and hypoxia, the Washington Post reported. They can also become crushed by the plane's equipment, or fall from the plane itself.
A Delta Airlines plane landed without its nose gear functioning Wednesday morning after pilots received a “nose gear unsafe” notification, according to a message on Delta's website. The flight left the Atlanta airport around 7:25 a.m. EDT and landed an hour and a half later safely in Charlotte, North Carolina.
The most common cause of gear-up landings is the pilot simply forgetting to extend the landing gear before touchdown. On any retractable gear aircraft, lowering the landing gear is part of the pilot's landing checklist, which also includes items such as setting the flaps, propeller and mixture controls for landing.
Broadly and generally, the reasons a pilot may leave the flight deck in flight can be grouped into two categories: first, physiological breaks – restroom, stretch, or required rest on longer routes; and second, operational breaks – handling a passenger, aircraft, or crew issue that requires the pilot to leave the ...
Best seats to survive a plane crash
Doug Drury, a professor at Central Queensland University, analyzed several flights that involved crashes and fatalities and came up with answers. It turns out that the aisle seats at the back of the plane are the safest, with an average 28% fatality rate if the plane crashes.
Commercial plane crashes are nowadays very rare, with approximately 45,000 flights typically completed each day in the US, all without fatality. That's a number that continues to rise, post Covid.
Are small planes less safe than larger? It might seem that way, but there are other contributing factors. "In a nutshell, the size of an airplane is not in any way linked to safety," explains Saj Ahmad, chief analyst at StretegivAero Research.
Blunt injuries resulting from deceleration forces, in particular head injury, are still the most important hazard threatening occupants' survival in aviation crashes.
Hawaiian Airlines is one of the safest airlines in the United States, which should come as no surprise given its sterling crash-free record. The airline has a fleet comprised entirely of Boeing aircraft and an average age of 12.8 years, the third-highest in North America.
Tests of airliner aircraft tires have shown that they are able to sustain pressures of maximum 800 psi (55 bar; 5,500 kPa) before bursting. During the tests the tires have to be filled with water, to prevent the test room being blown apart by the energy that would be released by a gas when the tire bursts.
A: Large aircraft tires are filled with nitrogen not air. Air is a combination of gasses that at low atmospheric temperatures and pressure can turn to ice inside the tires or under high temperatures and pressures even explode.
Aeroplanes and racing tires both contain nitrogen gas.