Courtesy: The Maui News/Chris Sugidono
(CNN, April, 22, 2014) — A teen who authorities believe survived a flight from California to Hawaii by hitching a ride in the plane’s wheel well was on airport grounds more than six hours before the aircraft took off, a federal official familiar with the incident said Tuesday.
The 15-year-old boy jumped an airport fence in San Jose, California, shortly after 1 a.m. on Sunday, hours before Hawaiian Airlines Flight 45 took off at 7:55 a.m., the official said.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, didn’t know when the teen climbed into the wheel well, but said the plane already was at the airport at 1 a.m.
Authorities said the boy came out of the wheel well of the Boeing 767 about an hour after it landed at the Kahului Airport on the island of Maui.
He is in the custody of child welfare services workers, said Kayla Rosenfeld, a spokeswoman for the state’s Department of Human Services.
The teen told authorities he was from Santa Clara, California, and ran away from home on Sunday, FBI Special Agent Tom Simon said.
Authorities said he told them that he crawled into the wheel well and lost consciousness when the plane took off.
If he did ride in the landing gear compartment, surviving the nearly five-hour flight in sub-zero temperatures at oxygen-depleted heights — as high as 38,000 feet — would have been against the odds.
Since 1947, 105 people are known to have attempted to fly inside wheel wells on 94 flights worldwide, the Federal Aviation Administration’s Civil Aerospace Medical Institute says.
Of those, 25 made it through, including a 9-year-old — a survival rate of 24%. One of the flights went as high as 39,000 feet. Two others were at 38,000 feet.
The conditions at high altitudes can put stowaways in a virtual “hibernative” state, the FAA said.
