The Man Who Fell to Earth: Plane plummet plod probe phone
SIM chip IDs stowaway who completely went to pieces
The man who spread himself across a street in Mortlake, London, after falling from an aircraft undercarriage has been identified. Police finally managed to crack open the SIM in his pocket and study it to discover who he was.
Jose Matada was the chap's name and he was 30 years old, the BBC tells us. He landed on Portman Avenue with a "massive bang" at 7.42am on 8 September last year, but the impact of the fall made identifying him a huge challenge.
An aeroplane from Angola was coming into Heathrow at the time, and would have dropped its landing gear at roughly the right moment to place the bloke on that street. But despite creating a photofit of his face and circulating copies of his tattoos, it was the SIM that finally gave investigating officers a name.
The chip was inside a phone, but that was obliterated along with the man's other identifying features after the fall from several hundred feet. The SIM was locked with a PIN, which explains why it has taken seven months to get the data off it - particularly since it turns out Matada was from Mozambique.
The police realised the SIM was important very early; officers are well-briefed on the value of mobile technology these days, but a SIM secured with a PIN is still tough to read. A handful of wrong entries and it locks itself down and refuses to communicate until the owning-operator's PUK (PIN Unlock Key) is entered, which one can only get if one knows the owning operator.
Given the presence of the Angolan flight - and of Angolan currency in the man's pocket - officers had assumed the unlucky man was from that country, and so presumably contacted local operators while reconstructing his face and photographing those tattoos. Most SIMs have a serial number written on the outside, from which one can identify the manufacturer, which would then be able to provide the name of the operator. We don't know if the number was legible, but if it wasn't that would explain the seven-month delay.
We are told that detectives called the phone numbers stored on the SIM but are still trying to contact his next of kin, so he probably didn't have much of an address book on the SIM - leaving only a list of the last few numbers dialled which all SIMs store by default.
Now that the body has a name, an inquest has been opened, but despite the stowaway originating in Mozambique rather than Angola, the story is a sadly familiar one: a desperate 30-year-old without a thorough grounding in relative air pressures and modern-day aircraft cabin design thought he could get to a better life in the UK.
Instead, the poor bloke ended up smeared across a West London street - leaving nothing but the last few numbers he dialled stored in a chip small enough to survive the impact. ®
COMMENTS
Man...
...that's a really shitty way to go. Poor bastard. =/
> Who, in their right mind, would think you could survive such an ordeal?
Or perhaps someone who has limited knowledge of aeroplanes but has seen it done countless times in Hollywood films?
Re: Man...
Spending 8 hours and 40 minutes in the wheel well of an aircraft flying form Angola to London at 25,000 feet with an air density of 0.039 and an outside temp of approximate -50 to -51C there is every chance he would have died of hypoxia and hypothermia during the flight. They body would have been in a frozen state and then defrosted on the decent or holding pattern over London. the corpse would have remained fresh until it hit the ground.
Even if he was still alive at the landing stage, unlikely because he was lightly dressed, it is highly unlikely that he would have been conscious.
He would have become unconscious very quickly after take off and know nothing of his ordeal.
@Obviously
"Mentally Ill perhaps?"
Totally desperate seems more plausible to me. The "who cares if I die out there or out here, I'll be dead anyway".
Re: Could he have survived the flight?
There are three things against survival. Lack of oxygen is one, low temperature the second, and the third is the fact that there isn't much spare room in a wheel well, so being crushed is highly likely as the wheels are retracted.
That and I suspect that unless you're ready for it, the lowering of the undercarriage happens rather suddenly and there's a good chance of falling out even if you were still in a condition to care.
