Early one Sunday in 2012 a man fell out of the sky over Sheen, an affluent suburb of south-west London, and landed in the middle of a quiet residential road. ‘I heard a monstrous bang. I thought someone had been hit by a car,’ one resident told a local newspaper. ‘Two fellows going to church said there’s a dead body in the street.’

The man was José Matada, a 27-year-old from Mozambique, although it would take several months for the police to discover his identity. Matada had a small sum of cash in his pocket and a mobile phone. The only message the police were able to extract from it was a single text: ‘I need a favour.’

Matada’s was not the first body to fall on Sheen, which lies directly underneath the Heathrow flight path. In 1996, Vijay Saini, a 19-year-old who had stowed away on a British Airways flight from Delhi, fell several thousand feet on to the site of a partially constructed supermarket. Two years later, another person fell at the same site. Customers in the Marlborough, a nearby pub, swore they had seen someone fall from a plane, although police were never able to find the body.

In 2015 the body of another stowaway, Mozambican Carlito Vale, believed to be 29, was found on the roof of a nearby office block and in 2001, a 21-year-old Pakistani man named Mohammad Ayaz fell on to a DIY store just across the road. Just before Christmas 2021, the body of a teenager was found on railway tracks in Sheen and it is believed that he too had fallen from a plane. An inquest at West London Coroner’s Court has recently concluded, having heard that UK police made ‘sterling efforts’ to find the boy’s family, without success. The boy’s T-shirt was traced to a motorbike shop in Nigeria, but the owners were either unable or unwilling to help the authorities further.

The bodies that fall on Sheen are stowaways. They typically hide inside the well in which the aeroplane landing gear is housed and, as the plane comes in to land, are flung from the aircraft when the wheels are released. The stowaways take advantage of lax security or – in at least one case – their roles as airport employees. Occasionally stowaways survive, usually on short flights in which pilots have been forced to fly at low altitude. Far more often, they die at some point during the flight, since temperatures drop to as low as minus 60°C and oxygen levels plummet in this unpressurised part of the aircraft. This means that, small mercy though it is, the young men who fell over London were already dead when they began their descent. They were frozen, in fact, which meant that their bodies were remarkably preserved. One witness recalled, upon finding one of the bodies, that at first he’d assumed he was seeing ‘a tramp asleep’.

Reporting on this macabre phenomenon rarely makes it beyond local news, although it’s not as if people don’t care. After every death, local churches offer prayers, people leave flowers and the police devote significant resources to discovering the identities of the dead men. This is not a trite story of migrant suffering and western indifference.

Rather, it is a local manifestation of a global phenomenon. Gallup, an American analytical company, periodically asks people in most of the world’s countries a simple question: ‘If you had the opportunity, would you like to move permanently to another country?’ In 2021, a proportion equivalent to almost 900 million people said ‘yes’, overwhelmingly residents of the poorest parts of the world. The UK has just posted record net migration levels, and this polling makes clear that many more people would be eager to migrate here if we let them. The two phenomena of small boats crossing the Channel and stowaways falling from planes both indicate that some people are eager to come even when we don’t let them, and that lethal danger will not dissuade them from trying to find their way to places as dull and rich and lovely as Sheen.

The government is apparently eager to discourage migrants from attempting to cross the Channel in small boats. So far, these efforts have been unsuccessful, and the plane stowaways are proving even harder to discourage. Although it seems likely that these young men have no idea of the danger they face, how on earth would we produce a global information campaign about such a thing? And while improving airport security might seem to offer a better solution, stowaways board aircraft in parts of the world with such poor infrastructure that security is easily circumvented. Given how few people attempt to stow away and given that the only person at risk is the stowaway himself, airlines have no incentive to spend money on introducing safeguards. Every now and again, another body will fall out of the sky, and most of us will have no idea.

In 1938 W.H. Auden published a poem inspired by Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’, on display at the Musée des Beaux Arts in Brussels. In the foreground we see a ploughman with his horse, a shepherd with his flock, a fisherman, a dog and a ship in full sail. Behind them is a city beside a placid sea. You could easily miss the man in the bottom right, legs flailing, as he hits the water. Bruegel’s figures are indifferent to him:

…the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure;
the sun shone
As it had to do on the white legs disappearing
into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that
must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of
the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.