Body found by airport track, officials suspect he was stowaway

İZMİR – Doğan News Agency

The body of an unidentified man has been found by the track at İzmir’s airport, with experts guessing that it belongs to someone who traveled as a stowaway in the jet’s wheel-well.

The body of an unidentified man has been found by the track at İzmir’s Adnan Menderes International Airport, with experts guessing that it belongs to someone who traveled as a stowaway in the jet’s wheel-well.

The man, who is estimated to be in his 40s, is likely of Middle Eastern or Arab origin, experts said, based on his clothing.

The police are now inspecting surveillance cameras to understand what happened.

One possible scenario is that the man flew to İzmir in the wheel-well and fell when it was opened, while another suggests that he tried to get on a plane from the Aegean province.

A Turkish Air Forces ambulance jet carrying 21 wounded Palestinians from Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport landed in İzmir on the night that the man’s body was discovered. Some officials have suggested the dead man could not have stowed away in the wheel-well of that plane as the security measures of military planes at Israeli Airports are known to be very high. Nevertheless, this flight is being inspected.

The air temperature at heights of 8,000 to 11,000 meters, at which jets usually fly, drops to -57 Celsius, making it almost impossible to survive for more than two minutes as the oxygen levels and the atmospheric pressure levels require special equipment. However, there have been rare occasions when stowaways in wheel-wells have survived. On April 22 this year, a 16-year-old Somali national, Yahya Abdi, flew as a stowaway to the island of Maui in Hawaii from San Jose, California, managing to survive a five-hour flight.