Stowaway found dead in wheel well of American Airlines jet, police say

CHARLOTTE, North Carolina – A stowaway was found dead in the wheel well of an American Airlines plane at Charlotte Douglas International Airport in North Carolina on Sept 28 after it arrived from Europe, police said.

The body was found just after 9am while maintenance work was being done on the plane, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department said in a statement.

Police did not say where in Europe the flight originated, and neither did they offer details about the identity of the stowaway.

Detectives with the department’s homicide unit are investigating the death, police said.

It is rare for stowaways to sneak onto planes, but those who do often hide in the wheel well, a compartment underneath the plane where the retractable landing gear is stored during flight.

The results are often fatal, according to data from the Flight Safety Foundation.

Earlier in 2025, two bodies were found in the wheel well of a JetBlue plane after a flight from New York to Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

In December, a body was discovered in the wheel well of a United Airlines flight that landed in Hawaii after flying from Chicago.

Those who survive may do so through a rare combination of luck, heat generated in the wheel well and a loss of consciousness and hypothermia that can help preserve the nervous system, according to research from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and the Federal Aviation Administration.

In 2022, a Kenyan man survived a flight from Johannesburg to Amsterdam by hiding in the front wheel well of a cargo plane.

In 2021, a man who hid in the landing gear compartment survived a flight from Guatemala to Miami. And in 2014, a California teenager survived a more than five-hour flight in the wheel well of a plane that flew from San Jose, California, to Maui, Hawaii. NYTIMES