Detectives are continuing efforts to identify a man who fell from a Kenya Airways flight into a south London garden.
The body landed just metres from a sunbather at the rear of a house on Offerton Road, Clapham, on Sunday.
The death is currently being treated as unexplained, yet the phenomena of stowaways is not as rare as one might think.
According to research by the Federal Aviation Authority in the US, there were 113 stowaways on 101 flights worldwide between 1996 and 2015. More than 76% of those attempts resulted in deaths, the FAA told Motherboard.
Reports on Monday said Heathrow Airport claimed it saw a stowaway “once every five years”.
The last such incident occurred in June 2015, when the body of a man fell onto an office building in Richmond, south west London. It is believed that the man’s companion on that flight survived.
Alastair Rosenschein, aviation advisor and former airline pilot, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the problem stems from a lack of security at airports across the world and the draw of migration to Britain.
“It is believed these are primarily illegal immigrants who are trying to get into this country by climbing into the undercarriage bay of aircraft,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
“On long-haul flights, the vast majority will die. On short-haul flights, it is possible, studies have shown that approximately one in four might survive,” he added. “There’s the dual problem of hypoxia, the lack of oxygen at high altitude, and also the freezing temperatures which can go down as low as 60 degrees.
“And very often these stowaways are wearing nothing but t-shirts and shorts.
“There is the other issue which is when they are in the undercarriage bay on taking off the poor stowaway is crushed when the undercarriage comes up.”
Rosenschein called for more security and checks to solve the issue.
“In that hour between the [pilots’] walk around and when the aircraft actually departs there are unlikely to be checks of the undercarriage,” he added.
In 2012, Jose Matada fell to his death from a British Airways flight inbound from Angola.
Matada, originally from Mozambique, was found on the pavement in East Sheen on September 9.
An inquest into his death heard he is believed to have survived freezing temperatures of up to minus 60C for most of the 12-hour flight.
But he was understood to be “dead or nearly dead” by the time he hit the ground.
In 2015, the body of a man landed on a shop in Richmond having clung on in the undercarriage of a plane from Johannesburg in South Africa to Heathrow.
Meanwhile, a bag, water and some food were discovered in the landing gear compartment once the Kenya Airways flight from Nairobi landed at Heathrow on Sunday.
Scotland Yard said enquiries, led by the South Central Command Unit and the Met’s Aviation Policing Command, would continue.