Wheel-well stowaway

Wheel-well stowaways are individuals who attempt to travel in the landing gear compartment, also known as the wheel bay or undercarriage of an aircraft.

[6][3] Many wheel-well stowaways are found, dead or alive, with their bodies covered in frost, suggesting severe hypothermia during flight.

Fidel Maruhi, who survived a wheel-well flight from Tahiti to Los Angeles in 2000, had a body temperature of 26 °C (79 °F), well below the level usually considered fatal, when emergency personnel began treating him on the runway.

[3] One survivor, Armando Socarras Ramirez, who defected from Cuba aboard an Iberia flight from Havana to Madrid in 1969, recalled in 2021 that his earliest post-flight memories are of Spanish doctors calling him "Mr. Popsicle" because ice covered his body when the pilot discovered him after his arrival.

He had boarded the plane while it was taxiing, carrying a flashlight, rope, and wool to stuff his ears; a companion fell out of the other wheel well before takeoff and a third backed out at the last moment.

After takeoff, he had suffered frostbite on his middle finger so severe it turned black holding on until the wheels retracted, but then remembered nothing save shivering and shaking from the extreme cold until he lost consciousness.