A man whose body was discovered in the wheel compartment of an Air Arabia jet at Gatwick Airport died from cardiac arrest, a lack of oxygen and hypothermia, a coroner’s court has heard. He has still not been identified, more than two months after the Airbus A320 landed in West Sussex following a flight from Tangier, Morocco, on June 16, 2026.
The discovery came not from a search but from a small detail out of place. A ground engineer working through routine checks on the aircraft noticed a packing strap hanging from the wheel compartment. When staff looked inside, they found the man’s body. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
Emergency crews were called to the aircraft shortly after it arrived that morning. “London Gatwick’s emergency services attended an Air Arabia aircraft just after 11.30 BST on 16 June when an incident was identified upon arrival,” a spokesperson for the airport said in a statement. The spokesperson added that a body was found, that airport teams went on to assist Sussex Police and the coroner, and that the airport’s thoughts were with everyone affected.
What the Coroner Told the Court
Officials opened an inquest at Horsham Coroner’s Court more than two months after the death. A post-mortem examination presented to the court gave the man’s cause of death as cardiac arrest, hypoxia — a lack of oxygen — and hypothermia.
The coroner said he had reason to believe the death was “unnatural,” a formal threshold that keeps the case within the coroner’s jurisdiction. He also told the court that conditions inside the aircraft’s wheel compartment were likely to have been extremely cold, with low oxygen levels — the two forces that, in combination, leave a stowaway with almost no chance.
Few other details were released. The proceedings were adjourned, and a full inquest into the man’s death is scheduled for February 4, 2027. Until then, the central question hanging over the case remains unanswered: who he was, and how he came to be inside the wheel well of a commercial jet bound for London.
Requests for comment sent to Sussex Police, Air Arabia and the West Sussex Coroners Service were not answered right away.
The Dangers of a Wheel Well
A wheel well is the bay underneath an aircraft that swallows the landing gear once the plane is airborne. It is not pressurized, not heated and not designed to hold anything but machinery. Anyone hiding there is exposed to freezing air, oxygen levels far too low to sustain a person and the gear itself, which can crush a body as it folds back into place. Stowaway attempts of that kind frequently end in death.
The medical findings in the Gatwick case set out that sequence in clinical terms: oxygen starvation at altitude, then cold. By the time the aircraft was back on the ground and an engineer was running his checks, there was nothing left to do but call the police.
A Second Body in Kuala Lumpur
The Gatwick inquest is not an isolated case. In a separate incident, a decomposing body was found inside the landing gear of an aircraft at Kuala Lumpur International Airport after staff noticed a foul smell coming from the compartment. When workers opened it, they discovered the remains and alerted airport managers, who brought in forensic investigators.
The plane had flown in from Tokyo and touched down at about 6:30 a.m. Investigators put the time the remains had spent in the compartment at 72 hours, and the state of the body led them to suspect the person had climbed into the wheel well on an earlier leg of the journey.
Early findings point to someone in their 20s. The body was dressed in a white shirt and jeans and carried nothing that could identify it, and the gender had not been established. Authorities are working to determine how the person got inside the aircraft and what killed them.
Still Waiting for a Name
Two airports on opposite sides of the world, two bodies in the same kind of steel compartment, and in both cases the same absence at the center of the file — no name, no documents, no next of kin to notify. In West Sussex, the man from the Tangier flight has been the subject of a police investigation and a coroner’s inquiry since June, and he is still recorded only as an unidentified man.
That is where the case rests. The evidence heard so far at Horsham Coroner’s Court establishes how he died: cardiac arrest, hypoxia and hypothermia, in the cold and thin air above the route from Morocco to London. Establishing who he was, and how he reached the wheel well of an Airbus A320 in the first place, now falls to the full inquest on February 4, 2027.