The conundrum of the man who fell from the sky

In 2019, the body of a man fell from a passenger plane into a garden in south London. Who was he?

A plane lowers its undercarriage as it descends for landing at London Heathrow airport. Photograph: Avpics/Alamy.

It was Sunday 30 June 2019, a balmy summer’s afternoon, and Wil, a 31-year-old software engineer, was lounging on an inflatable airbed outside his house in Clapham, south-west London. He wore pyjamas and drank Polish beer. As he chatted to his housemate in the sunshine, planes on their way to Heathrow airport made their final approach overhead. On his phone, Wil showed his housemate an app that tells users the route and model of any passing plane. He tested the app on one plane, and then held his phone up again, shielding his eyes from the sun and squinting into the sky.

Then he saw something falling. “At first I thought it was a bag,” he said. “But after a few seconds it turned into quite a large object, and it was falling fast.” Maybe a piece of machinery had fallen from the landing gear, he thought, or a suitcase from the cargo hold. But then he half-remembered an article he had read years before, about people stowing away on planes. 

He didn’t want to believe it, but as the object got nearer and nearer, it became impossible to deny. “In the last second or two of it falling, I saw limbs,” said Wil. “I was convinced that it was a human body.”

Wil took a screenshot of the flight app notification, and his housemate called the police to give them the details: Kenya Airways flight KQ 100, a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner that had left Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International airport eight hours and six minutesearlier, at 9.35am local time. Wil went out on his motorbike, hoping he would “see a bag lying on the road, praying it was just a bag or a coat or something,” he said. At one point, he found a rucksack lying in the road, and felt a surge of relief. On closer inspection, it was covered in dust. 

It couldn’t have fallen from the plane.

“As I went around the next road,” recalled Wil, “a police car came screaming past in the opposite direction and very nearly clipped my handlebars. I thought: ‘Oh, my God. It was a human. 

That’s definitely what this is.’”Wil followed the police car, which led him to Offerton Road, 300 metres away from his home.

The man fell into a garden at Offerton Road, Clapham, south London

A whey-faced young man – he looked to be in his 20s or early 30s – stood outside a handsome townhouse, trembling and silent. 

His name was John Baldock, also a software engineer, and originally from Devon. “He had a million-mile stare,” said Wil.

Wil looked through the window, into the garden. The patio was “totally destroyed”.

 He looked at John. “The first thing I said to him was: ‘That was a human, wasn’t it?’ Because I still wasn’t 100%. And he didn’t say anything, but he just looked at me and nodded. And then it hammered down on me, like a weight of bricks.”

Wil was right. It was a body. It – he – had plummeted 3,500ft, half-frozen, hitting the ground at 3.38pm. 

A crater in the ground where the man landed

He was the man who fell from the sky.The stowaway.

The Kenya Airways stowaway case would normally have been one for the Metropolitan police’s missing person’s unit, but on the day the call came in, the team was inundate. 

So DS Paul Graves of the specialist crime unit step forward. “I thought it was an interesting job,” Graves told me when we met last year in his narrow, strip-lit office at Brixton police station.

In his three-decade career as a police officer, Graves had worked on stabbings, shootings, kidnappings and attempted murders. 

These were exacting cases, and he was well used to media scrutiny, family and friends demanding answers, and witnesses who were reluctant to cooperate. 

As an experienced senior detective, Graves hoped to identify the fallen man and extradite his body, but he wasn’t exactly cheerful. “You’d struggle to find anyone who’s optimistic in the police,” he chuckled.

When the call came in at 3.39pm, officers sped to Offerton Road, where they spoke to Wil, John and the neighbours. 

Police contacted Heathrow, which dispatched staff to examine the Kenya Airways plane’s wheel wells, the unpressurised area into which the plane’s landing gear retracts after takeoff. 

In the wheel wells, there is just about enough space for a person to crouch and evade detection. Inside, staff found a grubby khaki rucksack with the initials MCA written on it.

A British Airways Boeing 787 descending to land at Heathrow. Photograph: Malcolm Park/Alamy.

The rucksack didn’t contain any significant clues: just some bread, a bottle of Fanta, a bottle of water and a pair of trainers. 

“It was literally about survival: food and water and a pair of shoes,” said Graves. 

But there was also a small amount of Kenyan currency, and the bottle of Fanta was found to have been sold by a Kenyan shop, indicating that the stowaway had almost certainly boarded the plane there. 

The flight had originally come from Johannesburg to Nairobi, Graves said, so it was helpful to rule out the possibility that the stowaway had smuggled himself on to the plane in South Africa.

At Lambeth mortuary, pathologists took samples of the man’s DNA and copies of his fingerprints, and sent them to the authorities in Kenya.

 The DNA results came back quickly: no match. 

Graves was hopeful that he would have better luck with the fingerprints, as many jobs in Kenya require that candidates are fingerprinted. But the stowaway’s fingerprints weren’t on the Kenyan police database, either.

If the stowaway avoids being crushed, they will probably die shortly after. Within about 25 minutes of takeoff, most passenger planes reach a cruising altitude of 35,000ft feet. 

The temperature outside the plane is approximately -54C, although the hydraulic lines used to extend and retract the landing gear emit heat, raising the temperature by as much as 20C. Still, -34C is cold enough to induce fatal hypothermia. 

The air at cruising altitude is about 4% oxygen, about five times lower than at sea level. This shortage will lead to hypoxia, when the blood is not able to supply enough oxygen to the tissues of the body, which can cause heart attacks and brain death. 

The rapid decrease in air pressure during ascent can also cause decompression sickness – known to divers as the bends – in which gas bubbles form in the body, causing a variety of debilitating conditions, some of them fatal. 

If the stowaway somehow survives the journey, they will certainly be unconscious when the plane begins its descent. 

So when the plane’s landing gear extends on its final approach, usually within five miles of the runway, the stowaway will probably fall from the wheel well to the ground thousands of feet below. 

This is why the bodies of stowaways are sometimes found in south London, under the Heathrow flight path. 

And yet what is truly extraordinary, given the risks involved, is that some stowaways do survive. 

This is something scientists have trouble explaining, not least because they cannot run experiments simulating what happens to human beings shut into wheel wells at high altitude.

 “Something happens that we don’t fully understand,” said Paulo Alves of the Aerospace Medical Association. 

Their best guess about how some stowaways cheat death? They hibernate.

The landing gear compartment of a passenger plane. Photograph: Aleksandr Papichev/Alamy.

In September 2019, three months after Graves took on the case, he flew to Kenya, hoping to uncover any scrap of information that might help identify the stowaway. He visited slums around the airport. 

He visited mortuaries, which were full of unclaimed bodies. Officials took him on a tour of Nairobi airport and gave him access to CCTV recordings. 

They revealed that after the plane landed from South Africa, it was taken to stand 1, where it sat for five hours, before being moved to departure gate 17, where passengers boarded the flight to London. 

CCTV of the departure gate and runway shows that nobody jumped on the plane as it was taking off and nobody climbed into the undercarriage while it was at gate 17. 

That means the stowaway almost certainly boarded the plane when it was being held at outer stand 1, where the CCTV coverage was less clear.

How had the stowaway managed to get on the plane? From a physical perspective, this wouldn’t have been hard. Stowaways usually make for the two rear wheel wells, because they are bigger than at the front of the plane. 

To access the wheel well, you have to shimmy about 6ft up the landing gear – it is covered in struts, making it easy to get a foothold – and crawl into the cavity that the wheels retract into after takeoff. 

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The hard part would have been gaining access to the aircraft before takeoff. Security at Jomo Kenyatta International was tight. “There was no evidence of any obvious security breaches,” said Graves. “All the staff had to use passes to go through secure gates.”

Graves knew that a groundworker, baggage handler or cleaner would have access to the plane when it was being cleaned, refuelled and loaded for takeoff. “You’re looking for a low-paid, low-educated person with access to the pan,” said David Learmont, consulting editor at the aviation news website FlightGlobal

Kenya Airways planes at Jomo Kenyatta International airport in Nairobi. Photograph: Monicah Mwangi/Reuters.

Kenyan airport authorities insisted to Graves that all their employees were present and accounted for, and that police interviews had found no evidence that staff had assisted the stowaway in accessing the aircraft.

Another possibility was that the stowaway had reached the plane by breaching the outer perimeter of the airfield

The case was befuddling. A man had climbed on to the plane in Nairobi. He had fallen from the sky over London. He was Kenyan. All these things were certain or very nearly so, and yet Graves was no closer to finding his man.

Graves is not the type to be maudlin, but the case did affect him. On the flight to Kenya, there was a moment after takeoff when he heard the crunch of the wheels retracting. He turned to his colleague and winced. “We just looked at each other,” he said. It was awful to imagine a person sitting beneath them, alone, cowering in the wheel well. “In my job, you see lots of horrible things: dead bodies and smashed-up people, and you do suffer compassion fatigue, to a degree. But when I heard the noise of the wheels, I thought: oh, blimey. It felt like such a desperate thing to do.”

For Graves, the story was always bigger than how the stowaway made it on to the plane. The question was: why? “We saw the aftermath of someone falling from an aeroplane,” said Graves. “But for me, the interesting part was, where did the story start?”

When Graves had exhausted all his leads in Kenya, there was only one thing left to do: make his findings available to the media, in the hope of reviving coverage of the story and triggering someone’s memory

Graves did manage to persuade Kenyan police to circulate information about the case through their police gazette, hoping to encourage regional officers to make inquiries. On his return to the UK in October, he disseminated an e-fit of the stowaway’s face – which had been reconstructed by pathologists in the days after the incident – alongside a photograph of his meagre possessions. 

The accompanying press release made reference to the initials written on the stowaway’s rucksack: MCA.

Reporters seized on this new information, Sky news published the results of an investigation in which they claimed to have identified the stowaway as Paul Manyasi, who had been 29 and worked as a cleaner at the airport. 

Manyasi’s girlfriend, who was given the pseudonym “Irene”, told Sky that the initials on the rucksack stood for “member of county assembly”, claiming this was Manyasi’s nickname. 

His mother claimed to recognise his underpants.

A section of landing gear android the wheel bay of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Photograph: Richard Baker/Alamy.

Willy Lusige, a journalist for the Kenyan TV network KTN News, was stunned. Like many Kenyan journalists, he had followed the story closely and attempted to identify the stowaway himself, but got nowhere with the airport authorities or police.

He had trouble believing the case had truly been solved. Orinde also had misgivings. “His mother said she hadn’t spoken to him for a number of years,” Orinde said, “but she was able to identify his underpants?”

Both men began to dig into the Sky investigation.

When Lusige found the family of the man Sky had identified as Paul Manyasi, he knew that something was wrong. 

“I expected because they had been told their family member was dead that there would be a sombre mood,” he says, “but when I went there it was just a normal day.” 

The father told Lusige that some white people came to visit the family and gave them $200. “Money had changed hands, and an illiterate father was convinced to go on record and say that his son was the stowaway,” said Lusige.

The Sky investigation quickly disintegrated. 

There was no record of a Paul Manyasi ever having worked at Jomo Kenyatta airport. Nor did the parents who Sky had spoken to have a son named Paul Manyasi. 

Their son was called Cedric Shivonje Isaac. (It is unclear where the name Paul Manyasi came from.) Finally, there was the inconvenient, but not inconsiderable, fact that Isaac was not dead, but alive, locked up in prison in Nairobi. 

“When foreign journalists come and do a story in Kenya,” Orinde said, “people open up, because they think that people around them will not see the story. They don’t imagine anyone at home is going to check to see if what was reported was true.” On 22 November, Sky retracted the article, and published an apology. 

Orinde remains perplexed by the case. “Kenya doesn’t have such a culture of people desperately trying to get to the west by any means possible,” he said. Kenya is relatively wealthy compared to many other countries in the region, with the sixth-largest economy in Africa. 

A more pressing concern, says Orinde, are the migrant workers who go to the Gulf states, and end up being abused by their employers.

By the end of 2019, Kenyan officials had wrapped up their investigation, and no breach had been found at Jomo Kenyatta International. It retained its category 1 security status.