For the first time in history
It’s gonna start raining men!
There is an old and unkind joke that you can always tell when a plane has landed in Australia from Britain: the engines stop but you can still hear the whining. Now it seems that Brits might retort that you can tell when a flight is bound for Heathrow from Africa, by the thuds of stowaways.
The body of an aircraft stowaway has fallen out of the sky near London’s Heathrow airport, landing in a garden reportedly right next to a shocked sunbather.
The man, who has not been identified, likely fell from the landing gear of a Kenya Airways flight on its way into Heathrow Airport, according to the Metropolitan Police Service.
“Good heavens, darling! What was that crash?”
“Must be the 4:50 from Nairobi, darling.”
The service confirmed officers were called to a home in Clapham in south London on Sunday after the man’s body was found.
“At this point, police believe the man was a stowaway and had fallen from the landing gear of an inbound Kenya Airways flight to Heathrow Airport,” police said in a statement.
“A bag, water and some food were discovered in the landing gear compartment once it landed at the airport.”
Well, at least he didn’t have any spoons. The Met would have put the whole suburb in lockdown.
But it turns out that these airborne Darwin Awards are becoming somewhat commonplace.
It is not the first death of its kind on flights to Heathrow.
Bodies have previously been found on the streets in the Richmond and Kew areas of London, which lie below the point at which many jets open their landing gear doors to put the wheels down on the Heathrow approach.
In 2015, the body of a man was discovered on the roof of a building in south-west London after falling from the undercarriage of a plane as it came to land from South Africa.
Three years earlier, a man from Mozambique fell from the undercarriage of a Heathrow-bound flight from Angola onto a street under the flight path near Richmond.
abc.net.au
Kenya, South Africa, Angola…there’s some common thread, there. If only I could put my finger on it.
