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Extraordinary

Thomas Jones

The way this unlikely story was reported in the Daily Mail, you'd think the Dubai Royal family was setting up in competition with Ryanair (note gratuitous use of the epithet 'free'):

A stowaway hid in the undercarriage of a jumbo jet and survived temperatures of -41c at 25,000ft during a free flight into Britain.

The jobless Romanian crouched in the rear-wheel compartment during an extraordinary 800-mile trip from Vienna to London on a Boeing 747 owned by the Dubai royal family.

immigration media

Comments

  • 10 June 2010 at 12:24pm
    Chris Larkin says:
    It's awfully nice of The Mail to point out that the Romanian was jobless as well. Helps to make the distinction from the employed Romanians who just want to travel super-economy.
  • 10 June 2010 at 2:41pm
    A.J.P. Crown says:
    If you think the story's bad, try reading the comments underneath it.
    • 11 June 2010 at 7:40am
      Joe Morison says: @ A.J.P. Crown
      I did just that, A.J.P. How very very sad these persons' lives must be locked into all that hate and intolerance. It would be hell to be someone so desperate to enter this country that you'd risk your life in such a way, but worse to be someone who feels only contempt for their suffering.
  • 13 June 2010 at 10:21am
    Mike Killingworth says:
    What is so extraordinary about the comments to the "Mail" piece (in itself an unexceptionable straightforward telling of the story) is the number of them that describe the man as an "illegal immigrant" even though the story itself correctly said that he is no such thing. (FWIW I reckon there's about a 2% chance of his having been sober when he boarded the undercarriage. Why didn't he hitch-hike like everyone else?)

    It is a hallmark of the conservative mind to describe the world as being how the conservative wishes it were. Merely to state that Romanians do have the legal right to enter the U.K. is enough to brand one as a traitor in this mindset