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The body of a stowaway was discovered in the wheel well of an American Airlines plane that landed at Charlotte Douglas airport Sunday morning, prompting an investigation.
American Airways confirmed on Monday that a body was discovered in the main landing gear compartment of a plane during a routine post-flight maintenance inspection at Charlotte-Douglas International Airport, but directed Forbes to contact local police for more information.
“On Sunday, September 28 shortly after 9 a.m., while performing maintenance on an American Airlines plane that had recently arrived from Europe, a stowaway was located in the landing gear,” the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police said in a press release.
Neither American Airlines nor local law enforcement have released details about the deceased individual or specified the flight’s origin airport.
In January, the bodies of two deceased stowaways were discovered in a JetBlue plane’s landing gear after the flight landed at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. On Christmas Eve, a deceased body was discovered in the wheel well of a United Airlines plane after it flew from Chicago O’Hare to Kahului Airport in Maui.
It’s the responsibility of the airport to control access to the ramp—the primary operational area where ground crews service planes and load baggage—while the airline is responsible for controlling movement around the aircraft itself. Aviation security experts say that despite robust security procedures in place, a determined stowaway is occasionally able to find a way onto an aircraft. In their investigation, authorities will first try to determine how the individual gained access to the plane. “There’s the back door of aviation security, which a lot of people never see—one with employee access doors and emergency exit doors—and those are the types of doors that a stowaway typically will access,” Jeff Price, a Denver-based aviation security expert, told Forbes previously, adding that investigators begin with CCTV camera footage and door alarm notification records. Before each flight, pilots are responsible for ensuring an external inspection of the aircraft, “including the fuselage, landing gear and tires,” according to the Federal Aviation Administration. But in general, “pilots don’t open the inner-well gear doors,” John Cox, an aviation safety expert and retired commercial airline pilot, told Forbes in January. “The pilots walk around the airplane before every flight, but opening those inner-well doors is more of a maintenance procedure done every two or three days.”
A FAA review of data from 1947 to 2020 showed a fatality rate of over 75% for stowaways on commercial aircraft. Most are either crushed by retracted landing gear or die from hypoxia (lack of oxygen) or hypothermia from the extreme cold at cruising altitude. In rare cases, however, stowaways have managed to survive. In December 2023, a person was found in critical condition in the undercarriage of an Algeria Air plane that landed at Paris after a two-and-a-half hour flight from western Algeria. And a year earlier, a stowaway survived in the nose wheel of a cargo plane that had flown to Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport from South Africa.
2 Stowaways Found In JetBlue Plane Raise New Questions About Pre-Flight Safety Checks (Forbes)