He recalled how he emerged from a coma months later to learn his best friend had fallen 5,000ft from the aircraft to his death.
Themba Cabeka, whose identity is revealed for the first time, was unconscious in hospital for six months after being discovered on the ground at Heathrow Airport. He had been starved of oxygen and subjected to temperatures of -60C as the British Airways jet flew from Johannesburg on June 18, 2015.
Only minutes before landing, Carlito Vale a friend who had also escaped the poverty of their South African camp site and had crawled with him into the wheel arch of the Boeing 747-400 fell from BA Flight 54.
His body was found in the air-conditioning unit of an office block in Richmond, six miles from Heathrow.
Themba Cabeka who has now adopted a British name, Justin, still uses crutches after falling from the plane at Heathrow
He says that when he came out of his coma, a police officer showed him Carlito’s passport and asked: ‘Do you know him?’ He replied: ‘Of course I know him. That’s my friend, Carlito.’
The officer told him: ‘He never made it. He fell on top of a building.’
There have been 109 recorded stowaway attempts around the world, London being one of the most popular destinations but only 24 people who took their chances in a plane’s landing gear have survived. The first known survivor was Bas Wie, 12, who hid on a flight from Indonesia to Australia in 1946.
Only two people have lived after stowing away to Britain: Pardeep Saini, a car mechanic from Punjab, who endured a ten-hour flight from Delhi to London in 1996, and Cabeka.
Even now, 25 years after his escapade, Saini now married with two sons and working as a driver at Heathrow is often traumatised by the experience, during which his younger brother froze to death.
‘I knew how dangerous it was but I just took my own chances. I didn’t care whether I lived or died. I had to leave Africa to survive.’
Cabeka tied himself to the plane with an electric cable wrapped around his arm. Aviation experts say it is very rare for stowaways to survive in an unheated, unpressurised part of an aircraft.
There is room, though, in the four sets of a 747’s landing gear, each in a housing the size of a car, as long as they stay in one of the corners away from the wheels when they retract.
Source - foreign reports