A body was found in a wheel well of a United Airlines flight that left Chicago on Christmas Eve, the company said in a statement.
“Upon arrival at Kahului airport in Maui on Tuesday, a body was found in the wheel well of one of the main landing gears on a United aircraft,” the company said. “United is working with law enforcement authorities on the investigation.”
The body was found in the wheel well of Flight 202 after it landed.
The wheel well of the aircraft, a Boeing 787-10, was only accessible from the outside, and it was unclear how the person gained access to it.
Earlier this month, Svetlana Dali, a 57-year-old Russian woman, was arrested for the second time after she allegedly cut off the ankle monitor a judge required her to wear while awaiting trial on charges accusing her of stowing away in the cabin of a transatlantic flight between New York and Paris.
Chicago’s own “serial stowaway,” 70-year-old Marilyn Hartman, pleaded guilty to felony counts of criminal trespass and escape from electronic monitoring in March 2022 and was sentenced to three and a half years in prison, though she received credit for two years and five months of time served.
Prosecutors said Hartman had been stopped by police on airport property a dozen times in four states, including getting by security in 2014 to board a flight from San Jose, Calif., to Los Angeles. In 2018, Hartman was arrested at London’s Heathrow International Airport after she was found to have slipped past security at O’Hare, spent a day at the airport’s international terminal and then blended in with passengers to get aboard a British Airways flight without a boarding pass.
