The bodies of two stowaways were found in the undercarriage of an Airbus A320 operated by Colombian airline Avianca shortly after the plane arrived in Bogota last Friday evening. Representatives of the carrier reported this.
Avianca’s narrow-body Airbus A320 operated a scheduled AV116 flight between Santiago de Chile and Bogotá. According to Flight Aware, the plane was in the air for almost five and a half hours and flew at an altitude of almost 11,000 meters most of the way.
Colombia’s aviation regulator, Aeronautica Civil de Colombia, said in a statement that two people were found lifeless in a landing gear bay while engineers were performing scheduled maintenance shortly after the plane arrived in Bogotá.
An Avianca spokesman said the airline immediately activated established security protocols in the event of such a development and notified the relevant authorities in Colombia and Chile.
The airline claims that the crew members conducted a preliminary pre-flight inspection of the aircraft, and nothing suspicious was found. However, as soon as the plane leaves the air bridge, the responsibility for the safety of the aircraft passes to the airport authority.
It is incredibly rare for illegal passengers to survive such long flights by hiding in an unheated, leaky aircraft landing gear compartment. In addition to the lack of oxygen at such altitudes, they are subjected to severe cold, which usually results in severe frostbite.
However, about a year ago, in January 2022, the “lucky” was found alive after a 12-hour flight, hiding in the landing gear of a cargo plane that had just arrived in Amsterdam from South Africa.
A few months earlier, in November 2021, a man survived a more than two-hour flight from Guatemala to Miami.
According to statistics, the airports in this region are at the highest risk of attempted illegal flights.