A stowaway was left in critical condition with hypothermia after being found in the landing gear bay of an Air Algerie plane at Orly Airport in Paris, officials said.

The man, believed to be in his 20s, was discovered by maintenance workers after the flight from Oran, Algeria, landed in the French capital on Thursday morning, prosecutors told AFP.

An airport official said the man, who had no identification on him, “was alive but in a life-threatening condition because of severe hypothermia” after the two-and-a-half-hour flight.

Stowaways in the unpressurized wheel houses can face temperatures of between minus 58 and minus 76 degrees Fahrenheit, as well as a lack of oxygen while flying at cruising altitudes of over 30,000 feet.

According to the US Federal Aviation Administration, 132 people tried to fly in the landing gear compartments of commercial planes between 1947 and 2021.

The mortality rate for people flying this way is 77%, according to the FAA.

In April, a man’s body was discovered in the gear well of an aircraft in Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport that had arrived from Toronto, but previously took off from Nigeria.

Four months earlier, two stowaways were found dead in the landing gear bay of a flight from Santiago, Chile, and Bogotá, Colombia.

In 2019, a frozen body landed in a man’s garden, narrowly missing him, after falling thousands of feet from a Kenya Airways plane flying over southwest London.

Four years earlier, the body of a stowaway on a British Airways flight from Johannesburg to London’s Heathrow Airport landed on a shop in Richmond, southwest of the capital.

A second stowaway survived the 10-hour flight and was found in the undercarriage of the aircraft.

With Post wires