Withstood about -50°C: This man flew in the landing gear compartment from Algiers to Paris

In France, a man was found hiding in the landing gear compartment of a commercial airplane after a two-and-a-half-hour flight. He is in a serious, life-threatening condition, doctors say.

The stowaway was spotted during a technical check of the plane after the Air Algerie flight from Oran, Algeria, landed at Paris Orly airport, The Guardian reports. He was taken to the hospital in serious condition.

As the airport source said earlier, the man "was alive but in a life-threatening condition due to severe hypothermia."

Commercial airplanes fly at altitudes between 30,000 and 40,000 feet, where temperatures typically drop to -50 degrees Celsius (-58F) and a lack of oxygen makes it unlikely that anyone travelling in an unheated and unpressurized landing gear compartment will survive.

According to the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), cited by the media, 132 people have attempted to travel in the landing gear compartments of commercial aircraft between 1947 and 2021.

In April of this year, the body of a man was found in the landing gear of an airplane arriving from Toronto from Nigeria at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport. Four months earlier, two passengers were found dead after arriving in the landing gear storage room of an airplane flying between Santiago de Chile and Bogota.

In July 2019, the frozen body of a man who was allegedly in the landing gear compartment of a Kenya Airways plane approaching Heathrow Airport fell into a garden in a London suburb.

According to the FAA, the mortality rate among people trying to travel this way is 77%.