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In 2015, a stowaway fell to his death in London.
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
He'd been hiding with a friend in the wheel well of a plane.
His death made worldwide headlines,
but his life was a complete mystery.
I set out to discover who he was,
why he had taken on such a perilous journey
and what happened on that plane.
For five years, I searched obsessively for the one man
who could answer all my questions.
The one man who, against all the odds,
had survived the most extreme journey ever made.
I'm Rich Bentley.
I've spent 15 years making documentaries all around the world.
Five years ago, I chanced upon a little-known story of people
trying to come to the UK by the most dangerous means -
clinging to the landing gear of planes.
ARCHIVE NEWS: As the plane flew over this street on approach to landing,
that's the point at which the wheels were lowered and he fell.
As I started to look into it,
I became aware of a chilling phenomenon.
The body was found in a British Airways Boeing 747
which arrived at Gatwick Airport this morning from Nairobi.
He fell to his death as the wheels were lowered
above this west London gasworks.
I couldn't begin to understand what it must be like to cling
to the undercarriage of a plane
or what would force anyone to attempt something so dangerous.
At 18,000 feet,
aviation experts say hypoxia, or oxygen deprivation, sets in.
At 22,000 feet, with no pressurisation,
the lungs have trouble functioning.
It's tough to maintain consciousness.
At 35,000 feet, hypothermia would set in,
as the temperature can drop as low as -81 degrees Fahrenheit.
I learned there have been 109 recorded attempts made
across the world.
And that London is the most common destination, with 16 wheel-well
stowaways in the last 25 years.
There was little information available beyond these grim news
reports, so I met with witnesses to some of these events to see
what else I could find out.
We looked out of the window
and we saw this young black guy laying there.
His head was on the kerb and there was brain matter spread
across the pavement and on some of the cars.
You can imagine the fear,
all of a sudden, realising that the air up there's thin,
freezing, rather like being on top of Mount Everest.
It happened just along here, by this wall here.
And it was in the morning, right?
It was, except it was Sunday, so it's probably a little quieter. OK.
No children going to school, thank goodness.
Well, it isn't the first time we've had people falling
out of airplanes in this area,
because as you can probably see,
the airplanes open their undercarriage around about now.
As soon as I got here and saw the state of the body,
he was mangled, there was a lot of blood splattering.
Some of his brains was on the car over there.
You know, I know, from the number of bodies I've seen,
he had dropped out of the sky.
The most affluent part of London, he lost his life in a car park.
All of these deaths had happened
just a couple of miles away from my home.
And I was surprised I'd never heard about them before, especially
as immigration dominated the news.
Coastguards around the UK are stepping up their searches
in light of reports of migrants trying to sneak into Britain.
3,000 migrants, who have been camped out in Calais, hop on board
those lorries as they attempt to get to Britain.
The electorate are generally not that keen on immigration.
We don't have the housing
or the National Health Service to deal with it.
More than one million refugees
and migrants have entered Europe in 2015.
Amidst the biggest human migration since the Second World War,
hiding in the wheel well of a plane was the most drastic of any journey
that could be made.
To understand how this was possible,
I met with a pilot who knew all too well.
In 1996, Mike Post was landing this very plane
at Heathrow when a stowaway fell from the wheel well.
This was the first death of its kind recorded in the UK.
It was the middle of the night when we took off from Delhi.
On this occasion, we were held for about ten minutes
at the end of the runway.
And that is when, I suspect,
he ran out and got into the wheel well.
I don't even think I can get here, even if I try.
And doing it under speed,
you just can't really imagine it, can you?
Blimey.
Struggling.
I can see the ledge.
Here. Yes.
So, the wheels would have come up and gone into this big space?
Yes.
And what we think, he was lying just here?
That's the only flat spot.
Do you know how long he would have had before the wheel started
to retract, when it left the runway?
It wouldn't be very long because you call for the undercarriage
to come up when there's confirmed positive rate of climb.
Probably a matter of 15, 20 seconds.
I feel jittery just sitting up here. I don't blame you.
The ledge that he would have ended up on, I don't know,
in my head, I thought it was more inside the plane.
Like, you can see the outer skin of the plane, and it's so thin.
In terms of warmth and in terms of oxygen, he's literally...
He may as well be outside. Indeed.
I'm trembling, this is scary. I don't like it. Yes. It's horrible.
No, I think it's terrifying.
There's no light, so far as I'm aware, in there.
So how he found somewhere to lie... In the dark, yeah. ..I have no idea.
And it's so much bigger than I thought.
Like, it's a massive bit of machinery. It's huge.
The hydraulics are so powerful, they've got to lift these wheels up.
Why would you do this to yourself?
There's something really unpleasant about thinking about,
this was the place that he lost his life. Absolutely.
God, the poor boy.
The sheer desperation that must drive someone to stow away
like this painted a bleak picture of a world where
there were no other options.
But what happened next brought this home in a way I could
never have anticipated
and drew me right into the heart of this story.
I've just landed.
I've been on a flight from Turkey,
and as I switch my phone on,
I've discovered that a body has fallen.
A man is believed to have fallen to his death
in the affluent suburb of Richmond, southwest London, after clinging
to a plane all the way from South Africa to Heathrow.
A body believed to be that of a stowaway was found here, on top
of the white ventilation shafts.
He was found in an electrical box on the roof
with his legs pointing upwards in a V.
Well, there's very little known about the victim himself.
He was discovered early this morning, at about 9:30 local time,
on the roof of the building that you see behind me.
But there was another twist.
The man who'd fallen from the sky had not been alone.
A second man remains critically ill in hospital,
the pair thought to have hidden together on the same flight.
Of course, we also don't know the exact condition of the other
person and whether or not police have been able
to talk to him just yet.
Against all the odds, this second man had survived.
Who was he,
how had he got on the plane
and what was going to happen to him now?
I made it my mission to find out.
NEWSREADER: British Airways says a man fell to his death
after stowing away in the undercarriage of one of its planes.
The plane was travelling
from Johannesburg to London's Heathrow Airport.
Another man, thought to be 24 years old,
is being treated in hospital
after he was found unconscious in the undercarriage.
The miracle man had endured an 11-hour flight,
clinging to the landing gear of a plane.
Of the 109 people known to make such a journey,
only 24 have made it alive.
But no one has ever survived a flight for this long.
Whilst the media was obsessed
with the man who'd fallen from the sky,
I wanted to find the survivor...
..because here was someone who had defied all the odds
and lived to tell the tale.
Hi, can I just run a quick inquiry past you?
I've been researching a case
of a young guy that stowed away on a British Airways flight.
We were hoping to speak to one of the officers
that dealt with the case.
Over the following weeks,
I spoke to every single authority involved with the survivor.
I'm trying to get hold of someone
in the press department for the Johannesburg police.
Have I got the right number?
I'm trying to speak to someone who works within foreign affairs.
Hello, can you hear me?
Just so I understand the process, what would have happened is,
the Met would have responded to the incident
and then essentially handed it over
because it was a sort of closed case.
OK, thanks very much.
Thanks. Bye-bye.
I even met with the Home Office.
But I came up against one brick wall after another.
I was left frustrated.
This was an important story, and I felt it needed to be told.
Whoever this survivor was,
he'd landed in the middle of a storm.
We are approaching one of the biggest decisions
this country will face in our lifetimes...
Is it not time we took back control of our immigration policy?
..whether to remain in a reformed European Union, or to leave.
The choice goes to the heart of the kind of country we want to be.
Immigration had become the political football of the referendum,
and compassion for migrants seemed to be at an all-time low.
We've got too many.
This is what the problem is, they've taken over our small town.
I switched tactics
and started to reach out to those working in the asylum system
for information on the survivor.
I was determined that what happened to him
would not be brushed under the carpet and forgotten,
but as much as I wanted to find him,
I had no idea if he wanted to be found.
I'd be so grateful for any help.
Cheers. Bye-bye.
And my efforts paid off with an important breakthrough.
I was forwarded an email from an official source
confirming his name...
..Themba Cabeka.
I went back to everyone involved in the case.
Trying to find Themba had become an all-consuming task.
Then at the point where I felt like walking away from it all,
I received information from an anonymous source.
Themba was in Liverpool,
and they gave me an address for a Home Office accommodation block.
All the way through this process, it's been like the smallest,
smallest little fragment of detail or information
has been a pretty major breakthrough.
And I think because it's been going on so long,
I've sort of become a bit immune to it.
But this is... in the scale of how...
..this has been going, this is absolutely enormous.
Like, to have not just a city, but an address,
and to have a name, finally, is....
..is massive.
But when I got there, I wasn't allowed inside,
so I tried to speak
to those people coming in and out of the building
to see what I could find out.
It felt like a long shot,
but it also seemed my best bet for finding Themba.
I've just spoken to two young guys.
It's frustrating, because neither of them had heard of him
and it's not that big of a place
that you would have thought they would have done.
After six hours, all I'd managed to do
was speak to a couple of people
and hand out my number.
With no other leads for Themba,
I decided to switch my focus to his companion in the plane,
the man who'd fallen from the sky and died in west London.
If I could find out the details about him,
this might open up a way to Themba.
A Guardian article named the deceased man
as Carlito Vale, from Mozambique.
He was a similar age to me, and had left behind a young wife.
I couldn't work out who had taken these photos
or where they were from,
but they were my first insights into the people behind the story.
I hoped this new information would open more doors,
but the only person who would speak to me
was the pathologist in Carlito's case.
What would have happened to Carlito as, you know,
as the plane took off?
There's going to be two effects from the point of view of Carlito.
As you go higher up, the temperature drops,
so your body temperature would go down.
And ultimately, if you're in that environment for long enough,
you can actually freeze to death.
The other thing is, you're going to have lack of oxygen
and that would give you effects, confusion, nausea, sickness,
simply because you haven't got enough oxygen.
It's surprising in this particular case
that it appeared that he was alive with the heart ticking
when he hit the ground.
If you have injuries that have got bruising around them,
you know that the person was alive when they hit the ground,
and we were able to identify that there were bruises
around a number of the wounds.
Really? So he was alive when he fell out of that plane?
He was alive, but exactly whether he was actually conscious,
that's another matter. So the cause of death
would have been reported as being the trauma.
Indeed, and we use a specific term, we say "multiple injuries".
He died of multiple injuries from impact with the ground.
Being here, I realised Carlito's body was still stuck
in a mortuary fridge
and that he would be buried in a pauper's grave
if no one claimed him.
I wondered if Carlito's wife knew what had happened to him
and where he was now.
The only details I had on her was an unnamed photo.
I struggled to get any further information
except for one of Carlito's friends,
a man called Joao,
who had grown up in Mozambique with Carlito
but was now living in the Netherlands.
Joao was wary of talking to me,
but after weeks of exchanging messages, finally agreed to meet.
I'm hoping that he'll be able to fill in some of the blanks
that I have around who Carlito was,
what he was like as a person
and also what might have led him to do what he did.
For the first time, I felt like I was getting somewhere.
I wouldn't just say Carlito is a friend of mine,
but he is actually a brother to me.
He was a very smart young man, very charismatic.
I have to say, I don't believe that he went willingly,
you know, because the Carlito that I know
wouldn't just take the risk.
I was shocked.
That's when I said it's not possible,
because a few months ago,
I got a phone call and an email from him.
He was trying to travel to Europe.
What did his email to you say?
"What are the steps you need to follow
"to be able to come to Amsterdam?"
It put me in a place of feeling guilty,
because I sent him an e-mail with all the steps
that you need to follow.
You need to have the right papers in hand
and you need to provide the right information,
why are you coming to Europe,
what are you going to do once you're here?
You need to be able to work and take care of yourself.
Maybe if I didn't say anything,
he would maybe have not tried to come.
Maybe I would still have my friend today. You were a good friend.
You did what a good friend would do.
You shouldn't... you can't, you can't feel like that.
That's not fair on yourself.
Like, who knows what the circumstances were?
You know, he travelled with another man, and no one...
..Do you know anything about this second person?
No, no.
Never heard of him.
I never got any information,
even though the media say there were two of them
but still, I haven't heard much about the second person.
Joao had given me my first glimpse of the man behind the photo,
and his description of his friend
as someone simply dreaming of a better life
was a reminder of an all too familiar migrant story.
While Joao didn't have any contacts for Carlito's wife,
I knew nothing of the survivor, Themba.
It made me wonder if there might be others
from where they had grown up who could help.
But with more than half a million people
living in their home city of Beira,
it was like looking for a needle in a haystack.
I knew Carlito was brought up in an orphanage
and I'd managed to piece together enough of the puzzle
to work out which orphanage this probably was.
I went online and I tracked up all of the roads from the orphanage
and I phoned every single business, every single church,
every single institution in the proximity.
I sent hundreds of messages.
One person replied.
His name was Jose, and he said he was a close friend of Carlito.
He also said he knew Carlito's wife, Anna,
and that he would introduce me to her
if I could get out to Mozambique.
I'm in a cab on my way to Heathrow
to fly to Beira...
..on the sort of hope, well, with a tiny glimmer of hope
that I might actually be able to find Carlito's family.
And my heart is racing.
I wondered if this trip would finally help me find out
the truth about Carlito.
And crucially, might his family and friends also know
the surviving stowaway, Themba,
and help me find him?
Four years after Carlito Vale fell to his death over my home city,
I found myself flying out to visit his.
On my way to Beira, I couldn't help but imagine Carlito and Themba
stowed away in the wheels below.
I hope meeting Carlito's friend Jose would unlock the mysteries
of this story - how Carlito and Themba made this journey,
what was behind that decision to do it,
and maybe, through Carlito's community,
I could find my way to Themba.
Reflecting on what I had gathered on Carlito, I couldn't help
but notice the contradictions.
On the one hand, he'd been described
as a bright and risk-averse young man.
But on the other hand, Carlito undertook a journey
that was completely reckless
and seemingly abandoned his wife in the process.
It's quite intense being here,
it sort of feels a million miles away from my life,
I know that's a really cliched thing to say.
I'm now starting to question
my decision making, really.
What happens if there's another story
and I'm about to find it out?
Hi, Rich! Hey, Jose!
Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too.
How's it going? Good, how are you?
Good, thanks. How was your journey?
Not too bad, not too bad.
I'm so grateful, thank you so much, it feels really surreal to be here.
Yeah, welcome, welcome. This is Mozambique!
I met Carlito when I was ten.
He was eight. Seven.
What was he like?
Strong. Clever.
He talks slowly, slowly, like he doesn't know how to talk.
OK!
Yeah.
A good guy.
Carlito and Jose were part of the generation of street kids
left in the wake of the 15-year civil war that ended in 1992
and resulted in the deaths of one million Mozambicans.
They grew up in a series of Western-run orphanages in Beira
that offered opportunities for a more stable future.
He would have been like a good friend, a brother to you?
Yes, and I was older than him.
You were older? Yeah, than him.
So, you lived together for seven years. And then what happened?
Carlito was sent to another orphanage.
From there, we separated for good.
When Carlito was found in London,
it was reported that he was with a second person. Yeah.
And that second person, I believe, survived the trip on the plane.
Yeah. I believe that his name might have been Themba. OK.
But I don't know how Carlito would have met Themba, I don't know if
they were friends, I don't know if the met each other at the airport.
They were friends, but not from a long time. OK.
I'm sure that they met maybe at the airport.
This was new information about Themba and I was keen
to pick Jose's brains further.
I heard from a friend of mine who is living in South Africa.
He heard that someone saw him there.
After the flight with Carlito? Yes, yes.
So, he's back in South Africa? Yeah.
So, I tried to contact him, to get his address,
but unfortunately, didn't manage to get the address. OK.
So it means that, right now, no-one knows where is he.
But they know who he is?
Yeah. Wow.
And do we know anything about him, do we know how old he is or...?
Mmm, I don't know.
Do we know where he and Carlito met?
So, he's not from Beira, he's never lived in Beira?
Actually, I don't know if he's from Beira or somewhere else,
maybe out of town or South Africa, another country.
But Themba is not a Mozambican name.
It looks like South Africa. OK.
I think Themba is the one who encouraged Carlito
to get the flight to England.
I'm sure that someone helped them. At the airport? Yes.
To get them to the plane? Yes.
Because there are security everywhere.
It's impossible to get in the aeroplane.
That's what I thought.
So, I'm sure that they paid to get in the aeroplane... Yeah.
..they had to pay someone, like a security.
And then, even when he gets to the UK,
did he think that he could just walk away? It was freezing.
It was freezing. Yeah, it would have been. It was freezing.
Themba is incredibly lucky to have survived.
Yes, he's very lucky.
Unbelievable that he survived.
He's lucky. Very lucky.
Yeah, he's lucky.
Can you imagine if you paid someone,
you think you were going to get on board a plane,
you think you're going to even end up sitting in a seat.
You get there, the adrenaline's going, you're on the airport,
you have to do something to get out of the sight of everyone
and you end up having to go up there?
So it could be that he didn't intend to be there,
he didn't think he was going to be there
and then he found himself in the wheel well of the plane.
And that would have been fucking terrifying.
The next day, Jose took me to meet Annah, Carlito's wife.
From all of my investigations,
she was the one person who would know
the truth about Carlito and Themba.
It had taken me years to locate Annah
and I was feeling nervous about meeting her.
I just really hope that she doesn't mind me calling in.
You don't think so? I don't think so. You think she'll be OK? Yeah.
OK. That's good. Yeah.
But when I arrived at her house,
there was another surprise.
Carlito and Annah have a daughter.
Hello.
It's nice to meet you. And you. I'm Rich.
Chemillah is 11 years old,
and I was instantly struck by how much she looked like her dad.
SHE READS TO HERSELF
I've only been able to find out a few details about who Carlito was,
but I wondered if you could describe him for me?
Can you tell me a little bit about where you thought...
you know, what Carlito was doing on the run-up to the accident?
Did you ever think that Carlito would do something like this?
There was a second person that went with Carlito that day,
do you have any idea who that person is or how they met one another?
No.
Chemillah seemed wary from the moment I arrived,
but when Annah and I started talking about photographs of her dad,
she joined us.
I've only seen two pictures of you two.
I wondered if Annah could explain when this photo was taken?
How old were you two at that point?
16. No! Really?
Had you just met one another?
JOSE:
ANNAH:
First time she's seen a picture.
The first time?
That she's seen a picture of her dad? Yes.
Aw, I'm sorry.
I don't want to upset her.
Whilst it had been hard to see Chemillah get so upset,
Annah assured me they appreciated me coming to visit
and to be able to talk about Carlito.
Being in Beira had given me new insights into who Carlito was
and some of the difficulties he'd been through that may have led
him to stow away with Themba.
But Carlito's life, like anyone else's, was complicated.
And whilst I'd hoped Annah might be the person who could
fill in the blanks, she had been completely in the dark
about her husband's plan.
What Carlito had done and his death
had come as a devastating shock to their family
and was clearly something they were still coming to terms with.
The hope they would lead me to Themba, like so many of my efforts,
had only resulted in more frustrations.
He was not from this community, and I was no closer to understanding
how he and Carlito knew each other,
how they had smuggled themselves onto the plane
and what had happened on that journey for one of them to live
and the other to fall to his death.
Back in the UK, I followed up Jose's information that Themba
might now be back in South Africa
but was unable to verify this.
For every step forward,
it felt like I was sliding two steps backwards.
Then, months later, on Christmas Eve,
having all but given up,
I got a phone call from a very unexpected source.
MAN ON PHONE:
I'm literally on my way to my family's for Christmas.
The phone rings, I missed the call, I just played back the voicemail.
It's someone from Liverpool saying
that they've found Thembo, they know who he is and they can put me
in contact with him. I can't believe it.
Bloody hell. Imagine if we found him. Fuck!
Three years ago, I left Liverpool dejected. At the time, I put
it down as just another dead end, but now it looks
like it's what helped me find Thembo, the survivor,
only he's now going by the name Justin, which might explain why
I've struggled to find him.
I cannot believe that I'm potentially going to meet our man.
I have no idea whether he's going to turn up or not.
I've travelled thousands of miles in search of the truth, and now
I'm back where I first started.
Could I finally be about to get the answers I've been looking for?
Hello!
I'm Rich. Nice to meet you.
Oh, my goodness! Yeah, man.
I can't believe that I've finally, erm...found you.
And how are you now?
Yeah, they are.
Liverpool is, like, renowned in the whole of the UK as one
of the friendliest cities.
Like, everyone's really super lovely.
I had been worried that after everything he'd been through,
Justin might be apprehensive about speaking to me.
But on the contrary, he is keen to tell his story and shine a light
on the experience of those seeking asylum.
You didn't know her.
Justin grew up in a poverty stricken township in Johannesburg
where violence and gangs left him broken.
So you were, essentially, on your own as a child?
Yeah. Looking after yourself. Yeah.
And is that how you ended up being homeless? Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
How old were you when that happened?
I asked Justin how he had met Carlito and what their relationship
was like.
A tent? Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Justin tells me he reached breaking point, and with Carlito still keen
to get to Europe, this was when they came up with the idea
to stow away together.
And where did the plan of getting on a plane come from?
Engineering. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Whilst Justin seems proud of the preparations they had made,
I'm struck by how neither of them seem to have any idea how dangerous
this plan was.
Did you know what would happen to the oxygen at that altitude?
I had always thought someone else must have been involved to help them
get into the plane,
but Justin insists they did it by themselves.
How did you get onto the runway?
So you put on loads of layers because you knew it'd be cold. Yeah.
I find it really difficult to even imagine what being in that plane
would have been like.
It's like, "Hmmm."
And then the wheels were still on the, on the thing you were holding?
Were you holding on to something inside the plane?
You could, presumably, you could see the wheels come back in?
So you can remember that, but then it just goes blank? Yeah.
It was heartbreaking to hear Justin describe the last time
he and Carlito were together and how in their excitement
for having got into the plane, they had no idea of the horrors
about to unfold.
I see. So when you were inside, you wrapped your arm around, like,
some cabling or something inside the plane and it got hot.
Without knowing it, wrapping his arms in the cables saved his life.
Unconscious for the rest of the flight, Justin did not know
Carlito fell out of the plane when the wheels were opened.
The next thing he remembers is lying on the tarmac at Heathrow,
semi-conscious with a shattered leg.
Can you remember falling out of the plane at Heathrow?
Justin has sustained life-changing injuries from the flight,
but the thing he keeps returning to throughout our conversation
is the loss of Carlito and the guilt
he feels that he made it and his friend didn't.
Justin has given me a harrowing insight into the circumstances
that led him to stowaway, but Carlito's motivations for getting
on the plane still remain unclear and it's left me with a sadness
that his death could have been avoided.
But I'm happy and proud that the UK has given Justin sanctuary
and that after everything he's been through, he is now safe
and has a chance to build a future for himself.
You sort of look out the window and see Liverpool sort of going to work
and just going about their normal life,
and then this person is just walking alongside them...
..with this absolutely...
..heartbreaking and extreme and hardcore story.
It's sort of... I don't know.
We're inundated every day by stories of unknown people
risking their lives to get into the UK.
It's taken me five years to piece together the story
of two such people.
I've retraced their footsteps and what I found is a story
of desperation and naivety, but also of hope.
It's easy to ignore or tune out of the news of migrants,
but behind every single headline, there's a person with a dream
just fighting for the right to live their life.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media