The body of a stowaway has been found in the landing gear of an Air France flight from the Ivory Coast to Paris, the airline said.
The lifeless body was found after Flight 703 left Abidjan on Tuesday and landed at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport, the airline said in a statement.
It expressed its “deepest sympathy and compassion for this human tragedy”.
A French police official said the young victim has yet to be identified but is thought to be from Africa. An investigation is under way.
Such stowaway attempts are extremely rare and nearly impossible to survive, the official said.
French media reported that the body belonged to a child migrant, though the official said it was too early to determine the victim’s age.
Plane stowaways are uncommon but do occur, with experts saying the chances of a one managing to avoid either being crushed by the wheels as they retract after take-off or being frozen to death during the flight are very small.
In July last year the body of a suspected stowaway landed in a south London garden, narrowly missing a sunbather. It is thought the man’s body fell from the landing gear of a Kenya Airways flight as it prepared to land at Heathrow Airport.
A bag, water and some food were discovered in the landing gear compartment of the plane when it arrived at the airport, the Met Police said.
In 2015, the body of a man landed on a shop in Richmond having clung on in the undercarriage of a plane from Johannesburg in South Africa to Heathrow.
Three years earlier, Jose Matada fell to his death from a British Airways flight inbound from Angola.
Matada, originally from Mozambique, was found on the pavement in East Sheen on September 9.
An inquest into his death heard he is believed to have survived freezing temperatures of up to minus 60C for most of the 12-hour flight.
But he was understood to be “dead or nearly dead” by the time he hit the ground.