Tragedy man ‘fell from the sky’

The mid-2019 incident of a man stealing a plane crashing near an airport in London, England in mid-2019 is seen as typical of the tragedies of poor migrants who accept danger in hopes of reaching ‘the region. promised land ‘.

Kenya Airways’ aircraft at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi. Heartbreaking discovery On the afternoon of June 30, 2019, 31-year-old British software engineer Wil was outside his house in Clapham (southwest London), drinking beer while chatting with a friend, above his head. , the planes were also rushing to Heathrow airport to end their journey. Taking out his phone, Wil shows him an app that tells the user the route and pattern of any passing aircraft. When he saw an airplane passing by, he opened the application to view information, then raised his phone to shade the sun and squinted at the sky. Suddenly, Wil saw something falling from the sky. “At first I thought it was a bag, but after a few seconds, I discovered the object was quite large and fell very quickly,” Mr. Wil said. Wil thinks that the object could be part of the landing gear or the luggage in the cargo hold. However, he suddenly remembered a long-read article about people hiding tickets on planes. Wil does not want to believe in this possibility but cannot deny the object gets closer and closer. “In the final seconds before the object lands, I see limbs. I think it’s a person, ”continued Wil. Shortly thereafter, Wil opened the flight determination application, and his friend called the police to report the news. According to information on the phone application, the plane that has just passed over that area is Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner carrying number KQ 100 of Kenya Airways. The man was dropped from a plane of Kenya Airways 1000m to the ground. After that, Wil drove his motorbike to find where the object fell, and mumbled to pray that he would only see a coat, a bag or something on the ground. When he went to the next route, he met a police car in the opposite direction and decided to follow. The destination is on Offerton Street, 300 meters from Wil’s house. When he arrived, Wil saw John Baldock, a gray-faced man standing dumbfounded outside a house. Looking through the window, Wil noticed that the inner garden was “completely destroyed”. “The first thing I told John was to ask if it was the same person, because I’m still not 100% sure. He said nothing, just looked at me and nodded, making my heart heavy, “Wil said. That man fell from a height of more than 1,000m to the ground. This is an airplane ticket evader. Hard search On the day of the incident, because the London Police Department’s unit in charge of searching for the missing people was overloaded, agent Paul Graves of the voluntary crime unit was in charge of the investigation. As an experienced senior detective, Graves has more than 30 years specializing in handling stabbing, shooting, kidnapping and murder conspiracy. He hopes to soon identify the man “fell from the sky” and return the body. After receiving the report, the police quickly went to Offerton Street, talked with Wil, John and people living in the area, and contacted Heathrow airport. The airport sent staff to inspect the landing gear – the area of ​​the aircraft’s landing gear will retract after takeoff – aboard a Kenyan Airways Boeing. There was barely enough room for one person to hide inside, and after checking in, an old backpack with the initials MCA was found there. The backpack does not contain any important clues, only contains a few pieces of bread, a bottle of soft drink, a bottle of water and a pair of sports shoes. “Food, water and shoes are the definition of survival for that person,” Detective Graves said. However, there was also some Kenyan coins in the backpack and a bottle of Fantamà, according to verification sold at a store in the country, showed that the stowaway was almost certainly on board there. The flight initially departed from Johannesburg, South Africa to Nairobi, Kenya. So the elimination of the possibility of a man getting on a plane from South Africa is a remarkable discovery: At the Lambeth Morgue, pathologists took samples of the man’s DNA and duplicate copies of his fingerprints. hand him and send it to the authorities in Kenya. However, the DNA determination later showed that it did not match anyone in Kenya. Graves hopes that he will have better luck with fingerprints as many problems in Kenya require candidates to have fingerprints. But the smuggler’s fingerprints were also not on the Kenyan police database. The incident meanwhile attracted the attention of public opinion. Because the situation of migrants betting their lives to reach Europe has appeared so often in the newspapers, and this is a completely different thing: an unidentified man, from a country about a third of the population lives on less than $ 2 a day, crashing the bottom of a plane into one of the wealthiest places in London. According to statistics of the US Federal Aviation Administration, from 1947 to February 2020, 128 people around the world tried to smuggle planes in this way. More than 75% of them were killed. The stowaway can fall off the plane during take-off, as in the case of 14-year-old Keith Sapsford falling from a cabin landing a Douglas DC-8 departing from Sydney, Australia for Tokyo, Japan, in January. 2/1970. Even if they survive the take-off, the stowaways can be crushed as they return, as Adonis Guerrero Barrios died in July 2011. The 23-year-old has climbed into the cockpit of the Airbus A340 from Cuba to Madrid, Spain. Even with luck avoiding the above possibilities, those who cling to the plane still face the cargo. Other deadly risk series. For example, within 25 minutes of take-off, most passenger aircraft reach an altitude of nearly 11 km, the outside temperature is approximately -54 degrees Celsius, the air pressure is about 4 times lower than normal, preventing the human lungs from getting enough oxygen from the air, which can cause heart failure and brain death. If the stowaway somehow managed to survive the journey, they would surely lose consciousness once the plane began to descend. Therefore, when the aircraft opens the door to lower the landing gear, usually within 8 km of the runway, they can fall freely. This is why bodies are sometimes found south of London, near Heathrow’s route, as in the case of Pakistani elder Mohammed Ayaz who died from falling from a British Airways flight into a Homebase parking lot. , also in Richmond in June 2001. There are also rare instances where some of the stowaways still survived that scientists have not fully explained these cases. In September 2019, three months after receiving the investigation, Agent Graves flew to Kenya, hoping to find out what details could help identify the mysterious but futile man. Dead end, he decided to use the last resort, thanks to the help and spread of the media, but failed. At the end of 2019, Kenyan officials decided to close the investigation. This is also seen as typical of the tragic cases of migrants. Many of them drowned at sea, were electrocuted in cross-strait tunnels, or assaulted to death by racist mobs. According to the Project Lost Migrants, 10,134 have been killed on the global migration routes since 2014. That might just be the tip of the iceberg.