STOWAWAY'S INCREDIBLE JOURNEY

Themba and his friend sneaked into the landing gear of a jumbo jet and flew from Joburg to London – only Themba survived

- JOY MPHANDE

IT WAS a plan so outrageous it beggars belief. Two young men desperate to escape their lives of hunger and hardship pore over aircraft engineering books and hatch a scheme to stow away on a Boeing 747.

They sneak into OR Tambo International Airport, manage to evade security, then wait until after dark before jumping over perimeter fences and dashing out onto the apron where a British Airways plane is waiting to take off for London.

They creep into the landing gear of the aircraft, strap themselves in and manage to survive the 11-hour, 9 000km flight, enduring temperatures of minus-60 degrees Celsius and speeds of more than 850km/h.

As the plane approaches Heathrow, disaster strikes. One of the men, Carlito Vale, falls to his death, landing in an office block in Richmond some 10km from the airport.

Incredibly, his friend, Themba Cabeka, survives to tell the tale – and it’s his story that is now the subject of a riveting documentary called The Man Who Fell from the Sky.

The motivation behind the men’s audacious plan is a tragic one: they felt they had nothing left to live for in South Africa.

The United Kingdom, they thought, would offer them more chances of jobs, more opportunity for hope.

“Everything was falling apart so we decided in 2015 to just get out of the country and go somewhere else,” Themba (30) says.

Sneaking into the landing gear near the wheels of the jumbo jet took some courage.

“We had to force ourselves to be squeezed in there,” he says. “I was not far from the engine. You could feel it outside when it was rotating. You could even see the houses down there when the plane was flying.”