The Boy Who Fell from a Plane...

Keith Sapsford from Randwick, New South Wales, met his untimely death in 1970 at age 14 in his attempt to travel as a wheel-well stowaway in a Japan Airlines plane en route to Tokyo from Sydney Kingsford Smith Airport.

This was right after escaping from a Roman Catholic Institution where his father Charles Sapsford sent him for reorientation of his mindset after discovering that the recent family trip to see the world had failed to satisfy Keith’s curiosity about how people around the world lived.

A wheel-well stowaway is a person who attempts to travel secretly in the landing gear compartment, also referred to as the wheel bay or undercarriage of an aircraft. So far, none of such attempts have been successful because if they survive the takeoff and landing phases of the flight, which is very unlikely, they stand the risk of hypothermia and hypoxia, because of the extremely low temperature and atmospheric pressure at high altitude — including the hearing damage that comes as a result of prolonged exposure to dangerously high decibels of sound outside the cabin bay and worse of all, death.

Surviving takeoff and landing is quite unusual because, at takeoff, the landing gear retracts into the wheel -well which has the tendency to crush a stowaway if he or she is not flung out of the airplane. Unfortunately, this was the case for Keith Sapsford as he was flung off the plane immediately after it took off crashing down 60 meters (90 feet). This was because the latch was opened mid-air, to take the wheel back inside the compartment.

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