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A 13-year-old boy from Afghanistan stunned airport authorities on Sunday when he arrived at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International (IGI) Airport not as a seated passenger but as a “wheel-well stowaway,” hiding inside the landing gear compartment of a Kam Air aircraft, officials aware of the matter said on Monday.
In such attempts, referred to globally as “wheel-well stowaways,” desperate travellers conceal themselves inside the wheel bay or undercarriage of aircraft. (Bloomberg)
The incident occurred around 11.10am on Sunday, when Kam Airlines flight RQ-4401 from Kabul landed in Delhi after a 1.5-hour journey.
As the aircraft taxied, the airline’s chief security officer spotted the boy walking on the taxiway near the plane and immediately alerted the airport’s Security Operations Control Centre, according to an airport official, who asked not to be identified.
The boy was quickly detained and handed over to security agencies, including the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF), which questioned him for several hours at Terminal-3.
A CISF official, who asked not to be identified, said the boy, a native of Kunduz, told interrogators that he had managed to sneak into Kabul airport and climb into the rear central landing gear of the aircraft before departure.
Such attempts are referred to globally as “wheel-well stowaways,” in which desperate travelers conceal themselves inside the wheel bay or undercarriage of aircraft. The space is not only cramped but also subject to extreme cold and oxygen deprivation at cruising altitudes. Many such attempts prove fatal, generally due to hypothermia.
In this case, the boy survived and was repatriated to Kabul later the same day, departing on another flight at around 4pm. “He said he managed to sneak inside the airport and the landing gear without being detected,” a CISF officer said.
A detailed inspection of the aircraft was later carried out, including the landing gear compartment, where a red-coloured speaker — believed to belong to the boy — was recovered, the CISF official cited above said. Officials confirmed the aircraft was cleared after security checks.
To be sure, such instances of stowaways, though rare, are not unheard of.
In January 2024, the bodies of two men were found in the landing gear of a JetBlue flight from the Dominican Republic to Florida. In December 2023, an Algerian youth was discovered in critical condition after flying from Oran to Paris, suffering from severe hypothermia. In 2021, a Guatemalan man survived a flight to Miami after hiding in the wheel well for several hours.
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