The airliner wheel-well is not the safest way to travel

Garee

Garee

New Member
Location
Fremont Secondary
 

Hawaii is free from Snakes However:

(BTS = Brown Tree Snake (from Guam)

Since 1981, eight BTS have been found on O‘ahu. However, the last BTS found in Hawai‘i was in 1998 when a dead BTS was found in the wheel well of a commercial aircraft. Increased interdiction efforts on Guam to keep BTS away from airfields have been credited with the decrease in stowaway snakes. Roughly 3,000 snakes per year are captured along the perimeter of the airfield at Andersen Air Force Base.
 
Stowing away in a wheel bay (well) is one of the dumbest things a person can do to stow away on a plane. I don’t know how anyone would do it, unless they worked for an airline because it is very difficult to get out on the tarmac to get to a plane and then to curl up in the wheel bay.

When the wheels are retracted, they are done so using hydraulic pressure. If the person isn’t secure enough inside the bay and the wheels cannot fully retract, an alarm sounds in the cockpit.

To make matters worse, if the plane is cruising at about 37-40,000 feet, the outside temperature would be around -50 degrees down to around -75 degrees. You would have to have healthy lungs to survive a 4 or more hour flight at that temperature.

I wouldn’t even attempt to do that.
 
There have been a few instances of people finding a body in their garden, having fallen from a plane when the undercarriage was released. They had probably died of cold shortly after the plane took off.
 


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