During the flight, the interior guts of the aircraft, they re pretty exposed inside the wheel well,

(CNN) The first sign something was off was when the ground crew at Kahului Airport luxury car rental florida in Maui noticed luxury car rental florida a boy wandering the tarmac, dazed and confused. The story he told officials was even more incredible.
Officials with Mineta San Jose International Airport back that up. It appears that this teenager scaled a section of our perimeter, airport spokeswoman Rosemary Barnes told CNN. The boy was able to proceed onto our ramp under cover of darkness and enter the wheel well of an aircraft.
If his story pans out and the FBI has been called in to investigate he rode in the tiny cramped compartment for almost five hours, at altitudes that reached 38,000 feet, without luxury car rental florida oxygen and under subzero temperatures.
But some people have survived. Since 1947, 105 people are known to have attempted to fly inside wheel wells on 94 flights worldwide, luxury car rental florida the Federal Aviation Administration s Civil Aerospace Medical Institute says. Of those, 25 made it through, including a 9-year-old child a survival rate of 24%. One of the flights went as high as 39,000 feet.
Someone could slip into unconsciousness so that the body cools and the central nervous system is preserved, said CNN aviation expert Michael Kay. Also, he said, there could be a situation where inside the bay is warmer than the external air temperature and you wouldn t get the instantaneous freezing of the skin.
The boy s survival is dumb luck mostly, says Dr. Kenneth Stahl, trauma surgeon at Miami s Jackson Memorial Hospital. The temperature outside the airplane could have been as low as 75 or 80 degrees below zero, said Stahl, who is also a pilot. Those are astronomically low temperatures to survive.
luxury car rental florida Investigators luxury car rental florida have surveillance camera footage luxury car rental florida of him hopping the fence at Mineta San Jose International Airport. There s also camera footage of him walking across the ramp in San Jose toward the Hawaiian aircraft, the California airport said.
The video footage of him in San Jose and Maui could indicate a serious problem. Clearly there s a big security breach here, which in the post 9/11 world order is a concern, said Kay, the aviation expert. To get past all sorts of people apparently unnoticed is a physical feat, he said.
Also, the wheel well is filled with equipment and technology that, if removed or dislodged in some way, could present an air safety risk, said Kay, a former assault helicopter pilot in the British military.
Surveillance video is under review by federal luxury car rental florida and local law enforcement officials here, she added. And we ll continue to review that to determine where, in fact, the teenager was able to scale the fence line.
It s not hard at all to climb inside the wheel well, said Jose Wolfman Guillen, luxury car rental florida a ground operations coordinator at Chicago s O Hare International Airport. You can grab onto the struts and landing luxury car rental florida gear assembly kind of like a ladder, and you just jump on the tire and climb into the wheel well.
Inside, there s not much room even less than in the trunk of a car, Guillen said. A stowaway would need to guess where the tire is going to fold in when it closes after takeoff. There s a high risk of getting crushed once the gear starts going in.
During the flight, the interior guts of the aircraft, they re pretty exposed inside the wheel well, so there s a lot of stuff you can hold on to, Guillen adds. It s just a matter of holding on to it for the duration luxury car rental florida of the flight and maintaining your grip when the gear opens up and not falling out. If you fell out, you could get horribly mangled or dragged on the runway.
It s possible for a stowaway to enter other parts of the plane through a wheel well, though complicated, Guillen said. It would require know-how. On a 767 and other wide bodies, there are small latched luxury car rental florida doors that a very small and fit person can (use to) access the wheel wells for maintenance. You could access the passenger cabin from the wheel wells, but again, some knowledge of the anatomy of the aircraft is required. I wouldn t know how to do it.
The most recent known case of someone surviving luxury car rental florida was on a short domestic flight in Nigeria. A 15-year-old boy snuck into the wheel well of a flight from Benin City to Lagos thinking it was a flight to the United States, according to an FAA report. The ride lasted only 35 minutes, and the plane likely went no higher luxury car rental florida than 25,000 feet.