For many years the concept of a stowaway has been a romatic one: someone who hid aboard a boat or a bus. The Marx Brothers even played stowaways in their classic comedy Monkey Business.
But now we’re in the era of air travel. And it’s not romatic any longer. In fact, it’s downright dumb:
A man’s leg and part of his spine came crashing onto the roof of a woman’s home in Nassau County near Kennedy International Airport yesterday morning, and a short while later the man himself was found dead in the wheel well of a South African Airways jetliner that had just landed.
A customs inspector in New York first spotted a portion of the remains hanging off the wheel well of South Africa Airways Flight 203, which began in Johannesburg and stopped in Dakar, Senegal, said Tony Ciavolella, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
Few details about the man were available yesterday, but officials said it was likely that he had been a stowaway and that he had been hurt – perhaps crushed to death – by the doors that protect the airplane’s landing gear after takeoff.
Stowing away (if this is what it is later confirmed that it was) aboard a commercial airline is peppered with risks. Unlike in the old days where people could just sneak on a ship and sit there and come out later (“Surprise!!”) any stowaway hiding on an airplane is taking all kinds of risks due the plane’s technology, air pressure changes, etc.
But a BIGGER question now becomes: if this was an airline, doesn’t it indicate a shocking LAPSE IN SECURITY that he was able to get on board? It is to be assumed a major effort is now underway to find out precisely who this person is.
A statement released by South African Airways said that it had agreed to keep the plane in New York for an extra day, and that the flight had landed “with no impact on our in-flight crew and passengers.”
Of course, he wasn’t the only one whose day was ruined by his poor choices.
At some point during the plane’s descent, some of the man’s remains fell onto the detached garage of Pamela Hearne’s home at 361 Louis Avenue in South Floral Park.
So potential stowaways remember: if you choose to stowaway on a commercial airline you may be going out on a limb.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.