The Tragic Story of the Boy Who Fell to His Death from a Plane
The the 14-year-old boy who fell off a moving plane — he just wanted to see the world
Keith Sapsford from Randwick, New South Wales, met his untimely death in 1970 at age 14 in his attempt to travel as a wheel-well stowaway in a Japan Airlines plane en route to Tokyo from Sydney Kingsford Smith Airport.
This was right after escaping from a Roman Catholic Institution where his father Charles Sapsford sent him for reorientation of his mindset after discovering that the recent family trip to see the world had failed to satisfy Keith’s curiosity about how people around the world lived.
A wheel-well stowaway is a person who attempts to travel secretly in the landing gear compartment, also referred to as the wheel bay or undercarriage of an aircraft. So far, none of such attempts have been successful because if they survive the takeoff and landing phases of the flight, which is very unlikely, they stand the risk of hypothermia and hypoxia, because of the extremely low temperature and atmospheric pressure at high altitude — including the hearing damage that comes as a result of prolonged exposure to dangerously high decibels of sound outside the cabin bay and worse of all, death.
