A sixteen year old Kenyan boy has grabbed global headlines in what has been described as a miraculous survival of a fourteen-hour flight to the Netherlands. He is suspected to have sneaked at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) as a stowaway.
The teenager survived freezing temperatures while clinging to the landing gear of a freight plane on Friday, February 5.
According to the Dutch Royal Marechaussee - a police branch of the Netherlands' armed forces- the 16-year-old was found on a jet that landed at Maastricht Airport.
The plane, which flew from Nairobi to London via Istanbul before arriving in the Netherlands, crossed the North Sea from Stansted at 19,000 feet where the temperature would rival that of a deep freezer.
The teenager was rushed to the hospital where he is being treated for hypothermia ( a condition of having an abnormally low body temperature).
"He is doing reasonably well," reads a tweet by the Marechaussee.
The security agencies are investigating whether the stowaway was being trafficked to another Country.
The flight in question is believed to be operated by an Airbus A330 that had arrived from London Stansted.
"He had tremendous luck to get through this," a spokesman for Maastricht Aachen Airport told Netherlands News Live.
It is extremely dangerous to be a stowaway in a flight as most either freeze to death or fall from hiding places during flight.
The teenager was extremely lucky considering that only 21 percent of airplane stowaways have made it alive to their destination since the invention of planes in 1903.
In 2019, an unidentified male body dropped off a local airline's plane as it made its descent into London's Heathrow airport.
It is believed that the man had hidden in the wheel well section of the plane hoping to survive the approximately 9-hour flight to the capital of the United Kingdom.
"A body of a yet to be identified male stowaway landed in a garden in the Borough of Lambeth, South London suggesting the stowaway was hidden in the undercarriage of the aircraft," a section of the statement released by KQ revealed.
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