Stowaway found dead after falling from British Airways plane

fholbert

fholbert

Mod's - Please don't edit my posts!
(CNN)A stowaway on a British Airways jet was found dead after falling on a roof as the plane approached London Heathrow Airport, authorities said Friday.

It's unclear whether the man had crouched in the wheel well, a common hiding place among stowaways.

A second man who was hiding in the undercarriage of the plane was hospitalized with injuries, the airline said.

The plane was flying from Johannesburg to London when the man fell Thursday and landed above a business in Richmond, southwest London. Johannesburg and London are about 6,000 miles apart, and the flight is nearly 12 hours long.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/19/europe/london-british-airways-stowaway-dies/index.html
 
Sounds like one was alive and is in the hospital. I guess he held on when the gear came down.

These folks who are surviving, are their bodies shutting down like a drowning victim' who is in cold water?
 
Boris Badenov said:
Well I mean it would be weird if he'd been found alive, wouldn't it?
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One was alive.

fholbert said:
(CNN)A stowaway on a British Airways jet was found dead after falling on a roof as the plane approached London Heathrow Airport, authorities said Friday.

It's unclear whether the man had crouched in the wheel well, a common hiding place among stowaways.

A second man who was hiding in the undercarriage of the plane was hospitalized with injuries, the airline said.

The plane was flying from Johannesburg to London when the man fell Thursday and landed above a business in Richmond, southwest London. Johannesburg and London are about 6,000 miles apart, and the flight is nearly 12 hours long.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/19/europe/london-british-airways-stowaway-dies/index.html
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Boeing Bombs and Tom Petty's song, "Free Falling" come to mind.

Seems to be happening more and more these days. Tragic for the victim.
 
Boris Badenov said:
Well, yeah, but the headline read "stowaway found dead after falling from british airways plane". I feel like in this case it's not the horizontal miles but the vertical feet that need to be considered.
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The record free fall without a parachute is held by a Polish FA.
Back in the 70's a bomb went off and she went flying, literally, at 3-5-0.

So the story goes.
 
deadstick said:
These folks who are surviving, are their bodies shutting down like a drowning victim' who is in cold water?
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Interesting analogy.
I'll give it a shot, having just passed Biochemistry (woo!) and feeling bored on a summer morning, but I'm no expert.
Proteins are extremely temperature sensitive, and if you're messing with thermodynamics, things can get messy (the breakdown of glucose to CO2 and H2O normally occurs at hundreds of degrees higher than your body temperature. The enzymes that catalyze the metabolism of glucose are able to lower that enthalpy to 98.6 degrees F. Pretty neat!). When your body drops below its optimum temperature, the protein components of your metabolic machinery are unable to perform their functions, which is very bad (especially so for the brain, energy vampire that it is). But conceivably, warming up the proteins again could enable them to start functioning again, supplying the body with energy. This is why a slight drop in internal temperature doesn't make you keel over. If, however, you get too cold, the proteins can be denatured--warped and broken, such that they can't work. More importantly, microtubules--bits of the cell's internal skeleton that are used for intracellular transport and a whole bunch of other essential functions--will permanently disassemble when exposed to severe cold. The melting of your cytoskeleton at very cold temperatures is what really kills you, though the inability to break down glucose is also unhelpful.
What's interesting about your comparison is that in both cases, it's not just the cold that's sending their body into a metabolic meltdown--it's the lack of oxygen in both cases. Obviously, this means that whether drowning or at altitude, the individual's body will be severely limited in the amount of energy it can produce, as unfortunately we're not anaerobic critters. I'd guess that it's significant that when drowning, the individual is flailing about (expending a lot of energy) as well as taking in no oxygen, whereas those hiding in the wheel wells are presumably very still, and though the partial pressure of oxygen is so low at altitude, it's more than nothing. The gradual nature of the oxygen deprivation probably enables them to hibernate rather than suffocate. But I don't know. It doesn't make much sense to me that they survive. The human body sure is awfully resilient.
 
Aside from the temp, I think it's that plus the reduction Ppo2 with altitude and that O2 still exists is the reason these folks are surviving. Like you said, hibernating. The temp and Ppo2 both ramp down on the climb and ramp up on descent. IIRC the last one who went between LA and Hawaii showed no sign of brain damage. The reduced O2 demand coupled with the reduced Pp maybe prevented this side effect. I think some cold water drowning victims do have it. Maybe because of absolutely no O2?

What's really happening is that NASA is behind these stowaways and is conducting secret studies of cryo sleep for deep space exploration.

You know, these planes would save a lot of fuel if everybody just went to sleep, and they weren't weighted down by pressure vessels.
 
dustoff17 said:
No sympathy for the "victim".

Tragic for the owner of the building he hit. Dragging wet snow off ones' roof and cleaning leaves our of the gutters is bad enough.
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Ever been to Jo-berg? It's a nasty place. Can't blame the guy for trying to get out of there. I'm gonna say most people that climb in to wheel wells are pretty desperate or not as smart as most of us. Especially when a lot of stowaways are coming from 3rd world countries and probably don't know jack about planes or altitude for that matter.
 
When you fly out of Africa, we have pickups on either side of the aircraft watching for people springing out of the tall grass and trying to stow away in the landing gear well.

It's a big problem and that's one of the ways we try to mitigate it.

People around the world live in some very hopeless squalid conditions and will do what they think they have to do and incur fatal risks to try to make it to better conditions.

It can be beautiful as a visitor, but disease, civil war, tribalism… ehh, you never know if the shoes were on the other foot, we wouldn't be doing the same thing.
 
sweeps said:
Ever been to Jo-berg? It's a nasty place. Can't blame the guy for trying to get out of there. I'm gonna say most people that climb in to wheel wells are pretty desperate or not as smart as most of us. Especially when a lot of stowaways are coming from 3rd world countries and probably don't know jack about planes or altitude for that matter.
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I've never been to South Africa, but it's not about 1st or 3rd world. You see here in the US people sueing, say, because no one told them that taking the medicine without a doctor's directions could harm them. I´d blame it more on movies where a guy stows away safely on the gear and appears in the cabin perfectly fine... but there's always some genious that believes everything they see at the movies...
 
Derg said:
When you fly out of Africa, we have pickups on either side of the aircraft watching for people springing out of the tall grass and trying to stow away in the landing gear well.

It's a big problem and that's one of the ways we try to mitigate it.

People around the world live in some very hopeless squalid conditions and will do what they think they have to do and incur fatal risks to try to make it to better conditions.

It can be beautiful as a visitor, but disease, civil war, tribalism… ehh, you never know if the shoes were on the other foot, we wouldn't be doing the same thing.
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Exactly...
 
MaRiO FDZ said:
I've never been to South Africa, but it's not about 1st or 3rd world. You see here in the US people sueing, say, because no one told them that taking the medicine without a doctor's directions could harm them. I´d blame it more on movies where a guy stows away safely on the gear and appears in the cabin perfectly fine... but there's always some genious that believes everything they see at the movies...
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See @Derg 's post above as well. I'm gonna say a lot of these types ain't watching movies all the time when they are struggling to survive. Also, there are some brilliant people on this world, and there are some really dumb people in this world. Most of us fall somewhere in between(I think/hope), what's common sense to us doesn't mean it is to someone else.
 
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