It's unclear whether the man had crouched in the wheel well, a common hiding place for stowaways.
A second man who was hiding in the undercarriage of the plane was hospitalized with injuries, the airline said.
The
plane was flying from Johannesburg to London when the man fell and
landed above a business in Richmond, southwest London. Johannesburg and
London are about 6,000 miles apart, and the flight is nearly 12 hours
long.
Airline tracking website FlightAware.com lists British Airways Flight 54 as a Boeing 747. It departed Johannesburg on Thursday night and arrived at Heathrow at 7:26 a.m. London time Friday.
In
a statement, the UK Metropolitan Police said an investigation is
underway, and British Airways said it's working with authorities in both
nations to get more details.
Plenty of people have hitched a ride on a plane by holing up in a wheel well. Most don't survive.
In
April last year, a 15-year-old boy sneaked into the wheel well of a
Boeing 767 and flew from San Jose, California, to Maui, Hawaii. He
survived.
In February of the same year,
crews at Dulles International Airport in suburban Washington found the
body of a man inside the wheel well of a South African Airways plane.
It's
not difficult to climb inside a wheel well, said Jose Guillen, a
ground operations coordinator at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport.
"You can grab onto the struts and
landing gear assembly kind of like a ladder," he said. "And you just
jump on the tire and climb into the wheel well."
But after takeoff, many scenarios could kill a stowaway hiding in the landing gear wheel well.
Inside, there's not much room -- even less than in the trunk of a car, Guillen said.
A stowaway would need to guess where the tire is going to fold in when
it closes after takeoff, he said. Otherwise, there's a high risk of
getting crushed once the gear starts going in.
This issue of stowaways making it aboard flights has raised questions about airport security.
CNN
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