Plane gear escape: Afghan boy echoes Punjab brothers' risky London flight stunt

A 13-year-old Afghan boy triggered a security scare at Delhi Airport on Sunday after hiding in the landing gear of a Kam Air flight from Kabul. The incident recalls a tragic attempt in 1996, when Punjab brothers Pradeep and Vijay Saini tried the same stunt on a British Airways flight to London.

For many youths in India, the West still draws them like a magnet. Pradeep, 23, survived the 10-hour ordeal, but his younger brother Vijay, 19, fell 2,000 feet to his death due to hypothermia. Temperatures at 40,000 feet had plunged to -60°C, and oxygen levels were dangerously low.

Pradeep later battled six years of depression but eventually settled in the UK. Now married with two children, he works at Heathrow Airport, remembering the brother he lost: “He was like a friend to me. We grew up playing together,” he had told The Mail in 2019.

In a 1997 interaction with The Mirror, Pradeep had revealed that they paid £150 to an agent in Delhi, who suggested they could reach London by hiding in the luggage compartment of a flight as stowaways.

In the current case, the Afghan boy, who authorities estimated was about 13 years old, was found wandering around the tarmac near where the plane had parked shortly after it had landed on Sunday morning, according to a statement from Central Industrial Security Force.

When they questioned him, authorities found he was from Kunduz in northern Afghanistan and that he had traveled by hiding in the “rear central landing gear” of a KAM Airlines aircraft, the statement added.

More than 77% of people who have attempted to hitch an illegal ride on an aircraft have died, the Federal Aviation Administration said in 2019.

(Names of Punjab brothers changed to protect identity)