Marrakech – An unidentified man died inside the wheel compartment of a plane that landed at Gatwick Airport after enduring extreme cold and a lack of oxygen, an inquest opening has heard.
West Sussex, Brighton, and Hove Area Coroner Joseph Turner opened the inquest at Horsham Coroner’s Court on Tuesday. The man died on June 16, and his identity remains unknown.
A statement from coroner’s officer Alex Jones, read in court, placed the man within the landing gear compartment of an Air Arabia flight that had arrived from Tangier, Morocco.
A ground engineer checking the aircraft found him after spotting a packing strap hanging out of the wheel compartment, and he was confirmed dead once located. The plane was an Airbus A320 that had flown from Tangier on June 16.
A post-mortem examination traced the cause of death to cardiac arrest, followed by hypoxia and hypothermia. Turner noted that conditions inside the wheel compartment would have been extremely cold, with oxygen levels far too low to sustain life. On that basis, he opened the inquest with “reason to believe this death was unnatural.”
The circumstances drew an immediate response at the airport. A London Gatwick spokesperson recounted that the airport’s emergency services attended the Air Arabia aircraft just after 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday, June 16, “when an incident was identified upon arrival.”
The spokesperson added, “As Sussex Police have confirmed, a body was found,” and that airport teams went on to support the police and the coroner, closing with “our thoughts are with everyone affected.”
Sussex Police launched an investigation into what had happened at the time of the incident. Air Arabia was contacted for comment.
The case fits a pattern seen at British airports in recent years. In 2022, a man’s body was found in the undercarriage of a Tui flight at Gatwick after it had traveled from Banjul, the capital of The Gambia. That route runs about 4,444 km and usually takes roughly six and a half hours by direct flight, and a Gambian government spokesperson described the man as an unidentified Black male.
Other cases have ended the same way. In 2001, the body of Mohammed Ayaz, a 21-year-old from Pakistan, turned up in the car park of a DIY store near Heathrow Airport. Four years before that, another stowaway fell from a Heathrow-bound plane onto a gasworks.
The inquest has been adjourned until February 24, 2027.
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