14 DAY TRIAL // Police in London are yet to uncover the identity of a man who fell from the sky near Heathrow Airport, in September this year.
As we wrote at the time, his body fell in the Mortlake residential neighborhood near Heathrow on September 9. The presumably North African man, in his mid-30s, was most likely hiding out in the engine room of a plane, and fell when the aircraft landed.
“When the landing gear comes down at the other end, a few miles from the runway and about 2,000 feet (600 m) in the air, if there is a person who had died they would fall out,” Richard Taylor, of the Civil Aviation Authority, explained.
According to the Huffington Post, no identification papers were found on him; however some currency indicates that he might have been a resident or a traveler through Angola. The coroner's officer listed hid death as caused by “multiple injuries.”
Officers released a sketch of the unidentified man, whose body was shattered at impact. The photo is attached to this article.
He had a tattoo on his upper arm, of which only the letters “Z” and “G” are still visible. The “Z” is crossed with a horizontal line. He was wearing jeans, white sneakers and a gray sweatshirt, reports say. Should he be identified, his body may be repatriated.
Aviation safety specialist Chris Yates of Yates Consulting believes he was already dead when his body fell from the plane.
“They so often end in fatality because more often than not stowaways climb into the wheel base or cargo hold, and those areas are not necessarily pressurized.
“When you start moving beyond 10,000 feet (3 km), oxygen starvation becomes a reality. As you climb up to altitude, the issue becomes cold as well, the temperature drops to minus 40 or minus 50 degrees centigrade, so survival rates drop,” he describes.