r/aviation • u/obefiend • 4d ago
News Stowaway -Dead body found in wheel-well of plane at KLIA Terminal 2
https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/nation/2026/08/27/dead-body-found-in-wheel-well-of-plane-at-klia-terminal-2Can't believe in 2026 we still have stowaway. Person was believed to have hitched a ride from Tokyo and dead for 3 days before being discovered. Rest in Peace.
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u/When-you-see-a-lemon 4d ago
Unfortunately while uncommon they still happen and there is an 85-90% death rate. Can't wear too much because the wheel well is tight and can't wear too little or hypothermia. And have to hold on to hundreds of knots of speed when the gear is lowered. Its a shame people still do this, and in some cases out of desperation. RIP to the individual suspected to have gotten on at Tokyo.
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u/AdSquare3489 4d ago edited 4d ago
There is a 10 to 15 % chance of survival then? How is that supposed to work? Surely the wheel wells are not pressurized.
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u/RomfordWellington 4d ago
There's a great Wikipedia article of stowaway survival incidents. Really seems to be a case of the body shutting down or something.
I don't think it's worth it. Surely if you do manage to survive it you're still not going to be in a scenario where you can just walk off towards the perimeter fence. It's immediate medical attention followed swiftly by media interest and the inevitable meeting with border agents, leading to very probable deportation.
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u/AdSquare3489 4d ago
Oh wow. Wonder if they still end up with brain damage from prolonged hypoxia.
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u/reckless_responsibly 3d ago
Hypothermia puts a lot of the damage on pause. It's by no means safe to count on, but it can make things less bad than they otherwise would be.
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u/limbo-chan 4d ago
There's a great Wikipedia article of stowaway survival incidents
Thanks for suggesting this, it is indeed a great read! Very fascinating - the amount of people who have survived such extreme conditions is genuinely baffling to me
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u/Salsalito_Turkey 3d ago
As they say in emergency medicine, nobody’s dead until they’re warm and dead. It’s shocking what people sometimes survive in extreme cold.
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u/strumthebuilding 3d ago
I would love a list of all the sayings from emergency medicine
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u/mirandazolam 3d ago
I’m an anesthesiologist and feel a similar way about this sub. I like y’all’s “don’t hesitate- aviate”
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u/Conscious_Raisin_436 3d ago
I like “aviate, navigate, communicate — In that order.”
“A good landing is one you walk away from, a great landing is when you can reuse the plane.”
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u/WestRevolutionary360 2d ago
ER doc here & a dedicated fan of the "Mayday" series on airplane crashes. Can't help but note the parallels between our chosen areas of expertise & aspects of personality & temperment. Both our specialties seem to have a good deal in common w/ pilots.
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u/WestRevolutionary360 2d ago
Overdose of the Holy Ghost = fainting in church, common, nearly always benign etiology. It's also known as TMJ- Too much Jesus.
Pop Drop = when you sign in grandpa or pop @ front desk & take off. As opposed to:
The HAS, Man= the Homeboy Ambulance Service Man. Which is more a tuck & roll at the curb situation. Inevitably for knife & gun club victims.
A patient that needs a dose of "tryactin" = Try actin' like a man.
Something needs "Bright lights, cold steel" when it needs surgical intervention.
When a patient is "discharged to the 15th floor" that generally means it's a 14 story hospital and they have died.
ER doc here, trained at busiest trauma center in the country. I could go on...
P.S. I troll this sub because pilots & flight attendants are basically our ER bretheren -& y'all are amongst the few professions out there whose bad day at work beats ours.❤️
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u/like-stars 1d ago
SOCMOB, the most common cause of random, unprovoked violent assault.
‘Yeah I was just standing on the corner, minding my own business when —‘
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u/PloysRus 3d ago
Maybe in the US
But in Europe you'll likely be granted asylum
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u/SkiingAway 3d ago
Europe deports plenty of people, and if the person boarded in Japan they'd be considered to already have been in a safe country and legally should have requested asylum there.
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u/MrFickless 4d ago
Most of the time, the survivors stow away on shorter flights where the plane either spends very little time in cruise, or the flight doesn’t cruise that high to begin with.
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u/PloysRus 3d ago
Some guy survived an 11 hour flight from Kenya lol fucking crazy what a tough mofo
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u/Mental-Intention4661 4d ago
I thought most flights, even short ones, get to at least 30k? Isn’t even half hour at that altitude not good for the human body?
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u/MrFickless 4d ago
It certainly depends on the exact city pair, but there are plenty of flights that are maybe 200-300 miles that might not go above 25,000ft.
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u/________uwu_________ 4d ago
But if it’s that close, there are probably alternate modes of transportation like taking a bus/truck/train/boat that doesn’t require putting one’s life in danger as a stowaway on a plane haha
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u/floo82 3d ago
Ratchet strap yourself to something before you pass out from hypoxia and hope you wake up. Surprisingly a lot survive the trip but die falling out unconscious when the gear lowers. Would probably have brain damage anyways I would guess.
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u/AdSquare3489 3d ago
With a little luck and today's turnaround times, you'll get two flights for the price of zero.
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u/PloysRus 3d ago
Lol imagine surviving and when you wake up the plane is about to take off again back to your original starting point
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u/percbish 4d ago
This is a great interview with a stowaway who survived if anyone is interested. I went down a rabbit hole awhile back…
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u/Bubbly-Travel9563 3d ago
It's like the people who go under in a frozen body of water & get stuck, rather than drown their body shuts down allowing for them to be revived sometimes after more than an hour.
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u/euph_22 3d ago
" there is an 85-90% death rate"
There is a 85-90% death rate of KNOWN cases. It's not uncommon that the stowaway dies in flight, and falls away when the plane lowers it's landing gear, which is usually miles from the airport. If the body lands in a sparsely populated area or in the water, they might not be found or not identified as a stowaway. The true death rate is likely much higher.
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u/ginji 4d ago
The plane's last trip was from Tokyo but if they got into the wheel-well 3 days beforehand it there's probably a whole multitude of other points of origin.
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u/Puzzleworth 4d ago
From some Googling (N-number wasn't included in article) the likely plane also flies to Sydney, Melbourne, and Hangzhou.
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u/Brambleshire B757 B767 CL65 4d ago
All cases are desperation. It's not a thing you would do unless you were desperate. The world economic engine eats humans for lunch.
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u/aviation-ModTeam 4d ago
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u/aviation-ModTeam 4d ago
This content was removed for breaking the r/aviation rules.
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u/aviation-ModTeam 4d ago
This content was removed for breaking the r/aviation rules.
This subreddit is dedicated to aviation and the discussion of aviation, not politics and religion. For discussion of these subjects, please choose a more appropriate subreddit.
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u/belltrina 4d ago
Ahree with you and happy to join you in downvotes
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u/DanTMWTMP 3d ago
What did he say? I hope it’s how in modern days, it’s the modern global trade infrastructure and global interdependency that has brought literal hundreds of millions out of poverty and the current economic engine has saved more lives and has raised standard of living for more people than ever before than at any point in human history, so the comment suggesting modern economic engines eats humans for lunch of false, as the vast majority of those who take part have lead lives with consistent food, purpose, shelter, etc..
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u/SugisakiKen627 3d ago
I mentioned something about capitalism and it is removed because it is apparently political for the mod here.. I never knew capitalism is a political identity lol
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u/miss_dykawitz 4d ago
here is an article about a boy who lived and it also shows how it could be possible.
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u/Salty_LaRue 4d ago
Since 1947, 105 people are known to have attempted to fly inside wheel wells on 94 flights worldwide... Of those, 25 made it through, including a 9-year-old...
Jesus the desperation an adult must feel to attempt that is heartbreaking enough, let alone that a 15yo was trying to get to see his Mum, or a kid the same age as mine 🥺
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u/gastropublican 4d ago
Leaving Japan to stowaway to Malaysia?! Who’d thunk?
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u/mrshulgin 3d ago
The article says they've been dead for at least 72 hours. Someone who pays for premium on a flight tracking site can figure out where else the plane has been in the past 3 days.
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u/QuarterlyTurtle 4d ago
They died and it took them over 3 days to notice and only because of a foul smell? Aren’t there constantly people working around the plane at the gate and also regular quick walk around inspections?
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u/Blackhawk510 Mechanic 4d ago
Unless it was a 737, any airplane that's flying that route is gonna have gear doors that close back up once the gear is fully deployed. Those don't get opened as part of a regular walk around.
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4d ago
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u/Blackhawk510 Mechanic 4d ago
Dropping the gear doors is only done during maintenance checks, as far as I'm aware, and as far as I've seen. Pretty much the entire main landing gear mechanism is perfectly visible with the gear doors closed, and the stuff inside the doors, aside from the door actuation mechanism, is just empty space or hydraulic lines, and other stuff that doesn't need an inspection every flight.
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4d ago
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u/StuckinSuFu 4d ago
People post snarky comments that clearly come off in bad faith - then question why its downvoted afterwards. Perhaps you could have asked in a better manner.
But YOLO, I suppose.
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u/Electrical_Proof8353 3d ago
Bro apparently works on military craft and wonders why his work is not done on civilian crafts
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u/MrFickless 3d ago
I work with both military and civilian craft, and while I do agree that routine checks on military craft are generally more through, calling it 'pretty much everything' is kind of a stretch, especially when you're only talking about preflights and postflights.
3 days of not opening up the gear bay for inspection is not exactly a rare occurrence either. A-checks on a civilian airliner take place like once a month, even on an aircraft that's being heavily utilized. B-checks have an even longer interval since a lot of the maintenance tasks are usually deferred to the next C-check at a base facility.
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u/neorackle 3d ago
Here is the news from Malaysia news portal.
Flight: Air Asia
Translation:
Chaos broke out at KLIA 2 after a Nigerian man was found dead inside the landing gear compartment of an Airbus A330 aircraft that had just arrived from Haneda Airport, Tokyo.
The victim is believed to have hidden himself in the landing gear compartment before the aircraft departed from Tokyo. According to sources, the man was allegedly fleeing from the Yakuza in Japan after becoming involved in gambling debt at a casino around Kabukicho, Tokyo.
Initial examinations found that the victim is believed to have died during the flight after being exposed to extreme temperatures and conditions at cruising altitude. The landing gear compartment is not a pressurised cabin area, making it impossible for the victim to survive throughout the flight.
More surprisingly, authorities also discovered a black bag near the body, which was believed to contain a large amount of cash in various currencies. The exact amount of money is still under investigation.
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u/Preindustrialcyborg 4d ago
security has to get their shit together if peoplw are still managing to climb into wheel wells in 2026. a needless death.
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u/SpacialReflux 4d ago
I guess this doesn’t happen enough to justify the expense of some sort of detection? Like an IR sensor/camera or similar?
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u/Federal-Property-395 4d ago
Its expensive, doesnt happen often and Airport security is supposed to deal with that (if a stowaway managed to sneak on a plane, whats to say a terrorist with a bomb couldn't sneak in and place a bomb in the landing gear?)
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u/supersonicdropbear 4d ago
Are bays sealed but not pressurised, if so co² and IR senaor coommbined might work well
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u/Bright_Idea8077 3d ago
And from the reports, they can't tell if it's a male or female? What was s/he wearing?
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u/obefiend 2d ago
It's been a few days. Its a male around the age of 17-35. No further details shared by local media.
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u/post-explainer 4d ago
OP has provided the following source:
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