A 13-year-old boy from Afghanistan stunned authorities on Sunday by surviving a flight from Kabul to Delhi hidden inside the landing gear compartment of a Kam Air aircraft. Aviation experts say such “wheel-well stowaway” attempts are almost always fatal due to extreme cold, lack of oxygen, and the risk of being crushed.
The Kam Air flight RQ-4401 took off from Kabul and landed at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International (IGI) Airport around 11:10 a.m. after a 90-minute journey. According to airport officials, the airline’s chief security officer spotted the boy, a native of Afghanistan’s Kunduz province, walking on the taxiway shortly after landing.
The officer immediately alerted the airport’s Security Operations Control Centre. The boy was detained and handed over to the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF), which questioned him for several hours at Terminal 3. Officials said the teenager admitted he had undertaken the dangerous journey “out of curiosity.”
Risks of “Wheel-Well” Travel
Internationally known as “wheel-well stowaways,” such attempts involve hiding inside the wheel bay or undercarriage of an aircraft. Conditions at cruising altitude – where temperatures can plunge to minus 60°C and oxygen levels are dangerously low – make survival extremely unlikely.
Many stowaways fall from the aircraft during takeoff or landing, are crushed by the landing gear, or die of hypothermia and hypoxia. The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) documented 113 such cases worldwide between 1947 and 2015; 86 of those individuals died.
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Precedents of ‘Wheel-Well’ Travel Survival and Tragedy
Despite the grim odds, a handful of stowaways have survived. One of the most well-known cases occurred in October 1996 when Indian brothers Pardeep and Vijay Saini hid inside the wheel bay of a British Airways Boeing 747 departing New Delhi for London Heathrow.
The brothers, both car mechanics from Punjab, were attempting to flee India after accusations of involvement with a Sikh separatist group. Twenty-two-year-old Pardeep miraculously endured the 10-hour, 4,000-mile flight, but his 18-year-old brother Vijay died during the journey. Vijay’s frozen body fell from the aircraft’s undercarriage as it prepared to land in London.
Medical experts later said Pardeep survived because his body entered a state of “suspended animation,” similar to hibernation. He was found in a confused state on the runway and taken to a detention center.
What Experts Say
Surviving the conditions of a wheel-well flight is extraordinarily rare. Aviation analyst Peter Forman says, “The odds of a person surviving that long of a flight at that altitude are very remote. You’re talking about altitudes well above Mount Everest and temperatures that can reach 40 degrees below zero. Most people would have useful consciousness for only a minute or two. To survive multiple hours without oxygen and in that cold is just miraculous.”
Zubair Amin is a Senior Journalist at NewsX with over seven years of experience in reporting and editorial work. He has written for leading national and international publications, including Foreign Policy Magazine, Al Jazeera, The Economic Times, The Indian Express, The Wire, Article 14, Mongabay, News9, among others. His primary focus is on international affairs, with a strong interest in US politics and policy. He also writes on West Asia, Indian polity, and constitutional issues. Zubair tweets at zubaiyr.amin
