A 15-year-old boy has been described as “lucky to be alive” after being found exiting the wheel housing of a Boeing 767 airliner at the end of a five hour flight.
The boy scaled a perimeter fence at California’s Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport on Sunday and climbed into the wheel well of a Hawaiian Airlines ‘plane bound for the Hawaiian island of Maui. He was captured on CCTV wandering from the airport tarmac and swiftly apprehended by airport security and found to be unharmed by his experience.
A statement by Maui Airports District Manager Marvin Moniz reads: “On Sunday, April 20, a juvenile male was found walking on the Tarmac at Kahului Airport just prior to 11:30 a.m. The teen appeared disoriented and was questioned by a worker near the plane who alerted security. TSA and the FBI were also contacted. Surveillance video at Kahului Airport showed what appeared to be the boy exiting from the wheel well of a plane from San Jose, California, that had landed in Kahului, Maui, at about 10:30 a.m. The boy was treated by airport and county medics and then transported to a Maui hospital. He has since been taken into the custody of the state of Hawaii Department of Human Services, Child Welfare Services Branch.”
The high school student, who is believed to have run away after an argument with his parents, somehow breached San Jose airport’s tough security regime to gain access to the aircraft, which will be the subject of an internal inquiry. Rosemary Barnes, a spokesperson for the airport defended its security measures, saying: “no system is 100 percent and it is possible to scale an airport perimeter fence line, especially under cover of darkness and remain undetected and it appears that’s what this teenager did.”
The boy, who has not been charged with any crime, claims he spent the majority of the flight unconscious, regaining consciousness only when the flight touched down. It was not immediately clear how he stayed alive in the unpressurized space, where temperatures at cruising altitude can fall well below zero and the air is too thin for most humans to survive for more than a couple of hours. A United States Federal Aviation Authority study of stowaways found that those who survive do so because their bodies go into a hibernation-like state.
In August, a 13- or 14-year-old boy in Nigeria survived a 35-minute trip in the wheel well of a domestic Arik Air flight after stowing away. Authorities credited the flight’s short duration. Others stowing away in wheel wells have died, including a 16-year-old killed after stowing away aboard a flight from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Boston in 2010 and a man who fell onto a suburban London street from a flight from Angola in 2012.
