HONOLULU (KHON2) — It was an unsettling and tragic discovery on Christmas Eve when the body of a dead man was discovered inside the wheel well of a United Airlines flight from Chicago after landing on Maui. The incident remains under investigation, but Jay VonBrimer, a veteran pilot said there are procedures in place to prevent exactly this type of thing from happening.
“We look at all the flight services, and especially in the gear-well. We make sure there’s no personnel or anybody in there,” VonBrimer explained. “Every aircraft has to be inspected right before flight, after all the all the ground equipment is clear of it, and after all the ground personnel are clear of it.”
VonBrimer said pilots are required to do pre-flight inspections before every flight. He said he doesn’t think this was an accident.
“It’s got to be intentional. Nobody would be stuck there unintentionally,” he said. “They just didn’t understand how non-survivable it would be to try and ride that aircraft up at those altitudes for that period of time.”
According to VonBrimer, the wheel well is extremely dangerous. There’s minimal space, hot equipment and lots of moving parts.
“You could lose limbs or be hit by spinning tires when they come into retract up into the wheel well.”
The temperature is also deadly.
“These long haul flights, they’re probably up at 38,000 to 42,000 feet, and the temperatures are probably between minus 30 to minus 70 degrees Fahrenheit. So that’s difficult to survive, even with the best winter equipment,” he said.
And that part of the plane is not pressurized so there is very little oxygen.
“You don’t get enough oxygen to your brain. That thing is Mount Everest, where people are on oxygen,” VonBrimer explained. “Even if you’re in superb shape you might be able to last, maybe five,10, 20 minutes. But a normal person’s useful consciousness there, it’s maybe 20 to 60 seconds. They’d be passed out and be dead in two minutes from the lack of air pressure and not be able to get oxygen to your blood.”
While VonBrimer said survival is highly unlikely, someone did survive back in 2014. A 15-year-old survived a flight from San Jose to Maui after stowing away on a Hawaiian Airlines flight by hiding in a wheel well.
Surveillance video showed the boy coming out about an hour after the plane landed at the Kahului Airport. He told authorities he was trying to get to Somalia to see his mother. He did not face any charges.
