A man’s leg and partial torso fell from a South African jetliner on to a suburban New York home on Tuesday as the aircraft prepared to land at John F Kennedy (JFK) airport, authorities and the airline said.
Police said a Long Island resident living about 9km from the airport called to report that a leg with a sneaker on the foot had hit the roof of a garage and bounced into the back garden, where it was lying in the grass.
More remains were found inside the wheel-well of the South African Airways (SAA) aircraft when it landed at JFK, arriving from Johannesburg via Dakar, Senegal. A spokesperson for the Federal Aviation Administration, Jim Peters, said a customs agent meeting the plane discovered another leg hanging from the left wheel-well section.
SAA issued a statement saying it had ”a stowaway situation where remains of a human body were discovered in the wheel-well of an SAA aircraft bound for New York out of Dakar, Senegal, last night [Tuesday]”.
The severed leg with a part of the man’s torso fell on to the home of Pam Hearne, who said she heard ”a loud crash” and thought at first that her neighbour was loading a van. She discovered the leg a few hours later.
”But I am very glad that I live where I do,” she said, ”so I don’t have to run for my life like this man probably was doing.”
There have been cases of stowaways being crushed by the mechanism in aircraft wheel-wells and perishing from the extreme cold at high altitude.
SAA said it is ”working with the airport authorities in both the United States and Senegal to investigate this tragic event” and offered assurances that ”there was no danger to the passengers of aircraft at any stage”.
Later on Wednesday, SAA said it was still mystified by the identity and origins of the body.
Transatlantic flights often fly as high as 13km above the Earth, twice as high as Mount Everest. The temperature at such heights plummet to as low as minus 50 degrees Celsius. There is also very little oxygen in the air there.
An aircraft’s wheel wells are not heated or pressurised, making a stowaway’s chances of survival negligible. — Sapa, Sapa-AP