The passenger was taken to hospital in critical condition.
A person was found in the landing gear of a plane arriving from Algeria at Paris-Orly airport in a state of “severe hypothermia”, sources close to the process told France-Presse (AFP) on Thursday.
An alert to the situation was issued late in the morning after an Air Algerie flight landed in Orly from Oran, Algeria, a judicial source explained to AFP.
The man found in the landing gear had no identification documents and was estimated to be in his 20s to 30s, according to the same source.
After being discovered, he was taken to hospital in a critical condition, he added.
The investigation is under the responsibility of the Civil Aviation Authority (GDA, in its French abbreviation).
An airport source told AFP the man was found “alive but in an absolute emergency due to severe hypothermia”.
The GTA confirmed to AFP that there was a “seriously injured person” in Orly.
A source connected to the process said the discovery occurred during “technical tests” on the device.
The source also confirmed that the man was “taken to hospital by firefighters” alive.
In recent years, there have been several reported cases of hidden stowaways in aircraft landing gear, unheated or pressurized.
In April, a man's body was found in Amsterdam-Schiphol when a plane arrived from Toronto (Canada) that had stopped in Nigeria.
Four months ago, two stowaways were found hidden in the landing gear storage compartment of a flight from Santiago de Chile to Bogotá, Colombia.
In July 2019, a man's frozen body was found in a garden in a south-west London suburb, a meter away from a sunbather. The man reportedly fell from a Kenya Airways flight on approach to Heathrow Airport.
At the cruising altitude of commercial airliners of 30,000 to 40,000 feet (9.1 km to 12.1 km), the air temperature drops below -50 °C, while oxygen deprivation is fatal.
Between 1947 and 2021, 132 people attempted to travel clandestinely by hiding in the landing gear of airplanes, according to global statistics from the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) cited by the New York Times in January 2022.
According to the same source, one hundred and two people died, a mortality rate of 77%.