NEW DELHI – Authorities at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International (IGI) Airport were shocked on Sunday when they found a 13-year-old boy from Afghanistan alive after a long and dangerous voyage as a “wheel-well stowaway.” The child had been hiding in the landing gear compartment of a Kam Air flight from Kabul and had survived the 1.5-hour trip.
The event happened about 11:10 a.m. when Kam Airlines flight RQ-4401 from Kabul landed. As the plane taxied, an airline security officer saw the youngster walking on the taxiway next to the plane and quickly called the airport’s Security Operations Control Center. The child was soon arrested and turned over to security officials, such as the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF), for questioning at Terminal 3.
A Miraculous Survival and Questions About Safety
The child, who was from Kunduz, informed interrogators that he had been able to slip into Kabul airport without being seen and climb into the back central landing gear of the plane before it took off. He was sent back to Kabul the same day, but the event has made people quite worried about security at the airport.
“Wheel-well stowaway” is a very perilous and frequently deadly way to travel. It involves hiding inside a plane’s landing gear. The cabin is small, unheated, and unpressurized, which means that stowaways are exposed to very frigid temperatures and very little oxygen at cruising altitudes. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) says that between 1947 and 2015, there were 113 confirmed attempts, and 76% of them ended in death. It is unusual for a boy to survive a flight that can reach great altitudes.
After the youngster found the plane, it was thoroughly checked out. Authorities found a red speaker that they think belonged to the boy in the landing gear box. After comprehensive security procedures, the plane was allowed to leave.
These kinds of things don’t happen very often, but they do happen. In January 2024, two men’s remains were recovered in the landing gear of a JetBlue flight to Florida. In December 2023, another Algerian teenager made a similar trip to Paris and survived, but was found in critical condition because of extreme hypothermia. This most recent case is different since the stowaway was quite young and seemed to be fine when he got there.