Out of thin air: the mystery of the man who fell from the sky | Hacker News Reader

Out of thin air: the mystery of the man who fell from the sky

theguardian.com

74 pointszhte41564 comments

This grim event happens in London with some regularity. The article notes some earlier cases but not the possibly most famous one of Jose Matadata who was found in a street in West London. Initially it was thought he had been a victim of a hit-and-run (car accident where the driver doesn't stop). The story was later made into a film (https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/film/new-film-over-tells-...) and BBC documentary (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25576086).

There was also one man who managed to survive (mentioned indirectly in the parent article): https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/stowaway-tells-how-sur...

One would imagine that anyone desperate enough to do something with a 75% fatality rate and hide in the wheel well of a plane would also research which wheel wells have space for a person and exactly how to tie oneself on to prevent falls...

I think the key to doing this is not knowing about the 75% fatality rate

Yes, probably if this person has access to Internet and has knowledge of the specialized vocabulary in aviation in a foreign language.

Yet I can't imagine myself being able to find the necessary information to hide safely inside a plane doing a long distance flight (and to survive -40° for several hours).

Yeah I guess someone capable of that would also be capable of earning a bit of money and buying a ticket.

For many people even millions of dollars wouldn't be sufficient.

Citizenship in many cases can't be bought. (No birth/id records, criminal past, unlucky country of birth, etc)

Citizenship may take longer but you can for sure buy investor visas

It depends where you want to go and what you want to spend. Peter Thiel circumvented a few of New Zealand’s rules in a very short time frame. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/revealed-how-peter-thiel...

It can be with millions of dollars.

With millions of dollars, you can buy convenience passports in e.g. Kazakhstan or Bulgaria.

Not the most powerful passports in the world, but enough to get visas for a lot of Western places.

You could get a substantially more useful passport and citizenship (Canadian) by investing $800K CAN in Quebec, not sure why you’d spend millions in Eastern Europe or Central Asia.

I may be wrong, but something tells me that Canada must be much more demanding on the provenance and destinations of these 800k$.

Several Caribbean Commonwealth nations are selling citizenship for around $300k USD. Typically this gives you visa on arrival access to western nations.

Looks like Dominica reduced costs to 100k or 200k in real estate.

Indeed. However it can be bought in many other cases. Malta (full eu member) essentially sells citizenship for about 600keur.

"What price would you put on a passport? - BBC News" https://www.bbc.com/news/business-41013873.amp

"Everything you need to know about the Malta Passport" https://www.globalcitizensolutions.com/malta-passport/amp/

Since Malta is part of shengen space, a Maltese passport is highly valuable.

The Maltese citizenship is very difficult to buy since a few years ago.

Stowing away wouldn't give you citizenship either. The key objective here seems to be physical access to the target country (to then remain illegally) which should be doable on touristic visas?

Most embassies don't give tourist visas to the jobless poor, because they're aware of the high chance of abuse.

Mobile Internet access/usage is very common in Kenya now but it wasn't in 2009 when this happened.

One would imagine that anyone desperate enough to do something with a 75% fatality rate would be indifferent to the outcome.

You're asking a lot of someone dumb enough to try something with a 75% fatality rate. This is not an activity done by those who do their research.

Nobody is "dumb" enough to knowingly try something with a 75% fatality rate.

Some people are desperate enough to do it.

The point still stands that most of these people probably don’t know about the fatality rates.

Tell that to the people who used to go over Niagara falls in a barrel.

But these people are apparently dumb enough to not spend five minutes googling it before putting their life on the line. And before you say they don't have access to the internet, almost everyone does even if it is through a friend or internet cafe - even in subsaharan Africa. Also, while politically incorrect to say, being dumb and being poor are strongly correlated. Things like education, educated parents, good nutrition etc are quite important to developing intelligence.

I agree they're desperate, but they're also dumb. No matter how you slice it, these are Darwin award winners at their finest.

The fact that random desperate people can get into the wheel wells of planes like this, from the supposedly "secure" air side of foreign airports, is a general risk to aviation security.

I’m not sure where you are, but this probably isn’t something that can only happen in foreign lands. It’s just that people in wealthier/better places are less likely to try it. The article mentions a US case.

This is a very well written piece. I read it last night before bed and couldn’t stop till the end. Very sad, very interesting at the same time.

Why don’t airlines spend $1000 a plane (3 older gopros and some streaming hardware) on some cameras that ground crew can check before a plane departs? This specific form of stowaway seems like it could be solved with a slight additional pre-flight checklist item before pushing back

If it’s installed in the airplane it has to undergo testing and certification by regulating bodies, this inflates the cost beyond what airlines are willing to invest to save lives. Look for articles about small trivial tweaks to airplanes and the time / cost they incur, it’s insane and stratospheric.

> this inflates the cost beyond what airlines are willing to invest to save lives

I don’t know. If you climb into the wheel well and die, that’s kind of on you, not the airline.

If you climb into the wheel well and break something (electric cables, etc.) and cause the plane to crash, that's on the airline.

It costs far far more than $1000 / plane, but modern planes do have cameras around them (Airbus ETACS is one such system).

What a fantastically depressing collection of stories. Quite terrifying to think about.

Why is this called a mystery? Seems quite clear to me.

The mystery is the identity of the man.

Is the wheel well directly accessible from within the plane itself?

If the pilot were made aware of someone in the wheel well during the flight would they still lower the gear when landing?

no, it's not, and separated by bulkheads from the pressurized area. I'm not aware of any wheel wells that have anything like an intrusion sensor.

Well, you have to land at some point and doing it without the landing gear lowered would put in danger the life of all crew members and passengers so... Belly landing can be done and have occurred in the past of course but it's certainly not without risk.

You could maybe risk a landing without the front wheel, but the article notes that stowaways prefer the larger rear wheels, which take the brunt of the impact on landing and are thus also much more dangerous to land without.

The wheel well is not accessible from the plane. And of course the pilot would lower the gear when landing, they are not going to do a belly landing and destroy tens of millions of dollars of property and risk everyone on board's life to try to save one stowaway.

A belly landing is probably not great for anyone in the wheel well either.

It would become an oven

Too long to read, I honestly tried... Someone please make a TLDR app and summarize the main content.

always wanted for something like this, it'd be a browser plugin at best

It's your lucky day - https://tldrthis.com/

It's meant to be a long read.

The article will prob be on the long read podcast in next few weeks

London is experiencing extremely high rates of violent crimes that have a much better chance of being solved than this one, to which comparatively vast and expensive amounts of police resources were dedicated with no hope of helping the victims of London crime. Property crimes are through the roof there and are pretty much ignored. As with cities like New York and Seattle, it feels like the priorities may be a bit askew.

The altitude a plane flies at varies quite a bit based on weather and flight traffic conditions right?

And some altitudes are very survivable, especially for someone who normally lives at a high altitude.

Is it plausible these flights normally take low altitude routes but for some reason diverted over a storm or weather system killing the hitchhiker's?

Terminal velocity is reached relatively quickly, in about 7 seconds IRC. You hit the ground at the same speed falling from a not so tall sky scraper as you do from the plane.

Surviving the impact is more about position, which material you are smashing into, and if you hit any objects right before hitting the ground in order to break your fall.

I think the parent had the temperature and oxygen levels at various altitudes in mind, not the survival rate of falling.

The long haul flights pretty much all cruise between 30,000 and 40,000 feet, usually about 36,000. People seem to black out at those altitudes but some live and regain consciousness on descent. For comparison the top of Everest is 29,000 ft and people can function there without O2 after a month or so of acclimatization.

If you are going try it I'd definitely take a climbing harness and some rope and try to tie yourself in.

I've read that the summit of Everest is a "death zone" where you are literally slowly dying, and the idea is to descend before you die. Brain scans show permanent damage from people who summit.

Nobody has stayed there more than a few hours.

People who run a business guiding other people to the summit are fools.

If you want a beautiful view from the top of Everest, hire an airplane.

Commercial guided climbs of Everest are nearly always with supplementary oxygen. Those climbing Everest without supplementary oxygen are individual athletes well aware of the risks.

> individual athletes well aware of the risks

"Neurologist Nicolás Fayed and his colleagues in Zaragoza, Spain, performed MRI brain scans on 35 climbers (12 professionals and 23 amateurs) who had returned from high-altitude expeditions, including 13 who had attempted Everest. They found brain damage in virtually every Everest climber but also in many climbers of lesser peaks who returned unaware that they had injured their brain."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-cells-into-....

Yes, but my post was specfically in response to your claim about Everest. I have close friends within the no-supplementary-oxygen Everest-tackling community, and everyone is well aware of the brain damage ramifications.

Being aware of risk is necessary for being foolish.

Having witnessed cognitive decline in others, I stand by considering it foolish to engage in activities with a near certainty of brain damage, when there isn't much return for the risk beyond a great view for a few moments.

> People who run a business guiding other people to the summit are fools.

These people are working with oxygen bottles though, aren't they?

Bottles are heavy and can't have enough O2 in them to be more than a supplement to delay the inevitable.

It's not like high altitude unpressurized flying when you've got plenty of O2 for the mask and you aren't physically working hard, and not for more than a few hours.

Yeah all the guides use oxygen. Though it can run out or pack up.

That’s not completely accurate. The death zone is above 7000 meters and one can survive for quite a long time, certainly more than 24 hours. You are slowly dying however- you’re immune system seems to lag or shutdown partially, the body stops healing itself which hinders recovery from the strenuous climb. But lots of mountains are above that altitude and many people have bivouacked in those conditions.

Also people react differently at high altitudes, and researching the effects are difficult. Even the Sherpas with their survival genetics occasionally get sick when they travel to low altitudes and return to 4000m, but inconsistently. I highly recommend visiting the high altitude research clinic in Periche, Nepal. Their short seminars are fascinating. It’s a small detour on the trek to Everest base camp, maybe two weeks of hiking to get there. Well worth it.

> People who run a business guiding other people to the summit are fools.

I think that’s an insult to people with limited opportunities in life and families to feed.

If you run such a business, but don’t do any of the climbing yourself, you could call that unethical, but not foolish.

> I think that’s an insult to people with limited opportunities in life and families to feed.

I'm not talking about the Sherpas. I'm talking about the westerners who guide people all the way to the top. To say they are forced to do it to feed their families? From what I've read about them, they're people who turned their expensive hobby into a business. Doesn't sound like desperation.

If those are fools, it’s not turning their expensive hobby into a business that made them so.

You can call them immoral for not informing would-be customers if the risks, or for luring others towards taking risks wit their lives,p.

And yes, if they aren’t aware of the risks involved, you could call them fools, but I think they know quite well what risks they take for their hobby.

It would be exceedingly rare for a typical long haul flight of 3-4 hours or more to not climb to FL320 or higher.

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