16-year-old survives in wheel well of Maui flight

originally posted by: Wrabbit2000
a reply to: WarminIndy

I'd go with what Zaph said. Some staff writer looked across the room at a wall map and said 'Hawaii looks about half way, huh?'. So it became, he survived half way across the Pacific. (Never mind poor Midway, named for it's more fitting position..lol)

I would think that only counts if they were actually flying the entire length of the Pacific.
He survived the whole trip, which was from Point A to Point B. Maybe the writer could have left that one out.

a reply to: WarminIndy

What? You expect a writer to do their job, and get something right?

So much for the MH370 theory depressurize at altitude to kill the passengers.

originally posted by: Zaphod58
a reply to: WarminIndy

What? You expect a writer to do their job, and get something right?

OH my goodness...lol.

When I wrote articles about film, I got it right. Journalism, that art died a long time ago, now all the writers seem to be from Romper Room. Someone paid for their education, isn't that sad?

a reply to: Wrabbit2000

Guess he didn't want to get the TSA grope down.

A 16 year old without a ticket can get onto a plane undetected and they call the swat team if you have a pair of nail clippers or 3 oz of shampoo.

The people need to start voting with their pocketbooks, hitting up their friends with pilots licenses and planes for domestic travel.

Once the airlines start to operate at a loss you will see things begin to change in our favor.

People (and Government thugs) will treat you as badly as you are willing to accept.

originally posted by: VforVendettea
a reply to: Wrabbit2000

Guess he didn't want to get the TSA grope down.

A 16 year old without a ticket can get onto a plane undetected and they call the swat team if you have a pair of nail clippers or 3 oz of shampoo.

The people need to start voting with their pocketbooks, hitting up their friends with pilots licenses and planes for domestic travel.

Once the airlines start to operate at a loss you will see things begin to change in our favor.

People (and Government thugs) will treat you as badly as you are willing to accept.

There are regional airports everywhere. Can we use them for short, domestic flights?

ETA: I meant municipal. I always thought municipal airports were primarily chartered flights for businesses.

a reply to: WarminIndy

I have three friends with pilots licenses* and I am not in a work environment where aircraft is used. I would expect to pay them for their time and whatever the person who lent them the plane thought the maintenance flight was worth.
Ask your friends you would be surprised who in your circle of friends has a license to fly a plane.
You don't think all those little planes at your local airport are used to dust crops do you?
Up until at least the late 1990s a smaller private plane piloted by an amateur (as is skilled, doing something for the fun of it, not for profit) was not 'required' to file a flight plan but the general consensus was that it was a good idea because if you had mechanical problems and had to land (small planes glide a lot better than the big ones) somewhere people would know where to start looking for you.

*Much like many extreme sports (horses, motorcycles, sailboats, shooting** and others people might have taken lessons and have the skills to do something for 'fun' and not expect to profit currency wise from it.

**Yes shooting is a sport whatever the coward nannies say and from a shooters perspective a bigger magazine is less of a PITA than having to reload every 5 shots, just as much as it would be if a driver had to stop and fill up his car every five miles

Local news gives a bit different info.

Barnes said the boy, under "cover of darkness," climbed a perimeter fence sometime between Saturday night and Sunday morning. He then walked or ran across the airport ramp and got inside the wheel well of Hawaiian Airlines flight 45 that left San Jose at 7:55 a.m. and landed five-and-a-half hours later at Kahului Airport in Maui.

Barnes said cameras did not capture the perimeter breach, but that there is surveillance footage of "an unidentified person walking on the airport ramp and approaching" the plane.

The Hawaiian Airlines gate is the northernmost gate at the airport, and the northwest area of the airport grounds is not heavily occupied. Barnes said that overnight, most of the gates are occupied by planes, and the first bank of flights typically depart starting at 6:30 a.m.

Link

I suppose he did admit to climbing the fence but it is not on video.

originally posted by: roadgravel
He then walked or ran across the airport ramp and got inside the wheel well of Hawaiian Airlines flight 45 that left San Jose at 7:55 a.m. and landed five-and-a-half hours later at Kahului Airport in Maui.

Nor did they mention how he picked the exact flight to take him where he wanted to go.
My money is on he just asked a random Joe/Jane which plane was going where he wanted and they told him.

My contempt to the point of out right rage at the TSA and their policies is only heightened by examples of their incompetence such as this.

a reply to: VforVendettea

The OP article

FBI spokesman Tom Simon in Honolulu told The Associated Press on Sunday night that the boy was questioned by the FBI after being discovered on the tarmac at the Maui airport with no identification.

Simon said security footage from the San Jose airport verified that the boy from Santa Clara, Calif., hopped a fence to get to Hawaiian Airlines Flight 45 on Sunday morning.

So who is a person to believe, news reports or FBI? I suspect the 'on video' is a make people feel better thing.

Update:

AP has more on the story..

He passed out in the air and didn't regain consciousness until an hour after the plane landed in Hawaii, Simon said. When he came to, he climbed out of the wheel well and was immediately seen by airport personnel who escorted him inside where he was interviewed by the FBI, Simon said.

It was not immediately clear how the boy stayed alive in the unpressurized space, where temperatures at cruising altitude can fall well below zero and the air is too thin for humans to stay conscious.

Well, it sounds like he really was lucky then. Nothing special or weird. Just plain luck of being young, dumb and healthy enough to survive what isn't supposed to be survivable.

The FAA says 105 stowaways have sneaked aboard 94 flights worldwide since 1947, and about 1 out of 4 survived. But agency studies say the actual numbers are probably higher, as some survivors may have escaped unnoticed, and bodies could fall into the ocean undetected.

In August, a 13- or 14-year-old boy in Nigeria survived a 35-minute trip in the wheel well of a domestic flight after stowing away. Authorities credited the flight's short duration and its altitude of about 25,000 feet. Others who hid in wheel wells have died, including a 16-year-old killed aboard a flight from Charlotte, N.C., to Boston in 2010 and a man who fell onto a suburban London street as a flight from Angola began its descent in 2012.

Source

It's a very long story by AP standards and very well worth going over to read for the full one. They hit on a lot in that one.

A doctor was saying that he didn't believe the temperatures got low enough (-40) for him to get frostbite. He also said the boy may have gone into a hibernation state which protected his brain from the low oxygen.

One lucky kid.

Makes you wonder about security though.

a reply to: Wrabbit2000

Thanks for the update Rascally!

Perhaps ground staff need to check the wheel wells before removing the wheel chocks or a wide angle camera needs to be placed and checked as part of pre-flight checklist. The problem is that, where there is a will there is a way.

TSA security is simply an excuse to train the public as we all know. There are known holes in security because of the lack of security on all of the airport's staff, and there are a lot of them, that simply do not pass through high security in the daily jobs.

If a child with no training can simply jump a fence, what can someone else, with high levels of training do?

I have a huge number of ideas for getting small devices aboard an aircraft, none of which I would share, but in the modern era it is not too difficult no matter what level of security you employ.

The big question is "How many hijackings have the TSA prevented?" and the answer is .... NONE.

The next question is "How many Children and others have the TSA harmed via intrusive searches." Psychological harm is a real problem and young children can be harmed for life by these untrained authoritarian, egotistical apes.

Could a professional, highly trained person have placed multiple devices on board multiple aircraft .... well, yes!

More and more, aircraft security is in the spotlight for massive failures. Hell .... an entire modern jetliner is still bloody well missing because cabin crew can just turn off locator system on a whim.

How stupid do THEY think we are.

P:

a reply to: pheonix358

I think you would really enjoy a book. Rogue Warrior by Dick Marcinko. He founded the original Seal Team Six when it was still a team, not a whole command unto itself.

He also ran a team doing red cell training for counter terrorism and I don't want to spoil some of the best non-fiction stories he's written (better than most fiction) but the one of interest involved Air Force One. Apparently they did a training run against it without the S.S. being given the notice anything was going to happen. In most stories, this is where they'd get caught in some spectacular way. Seal Team Six is special for a reason tho...and same guys. They pulled it off with a simulated device, if I recall correctly, placed well inside the plane. Then back out and no one knew anything until one of the agents found their present.

Wild stuff.....but if people are actually well trained, TSA isn't a match anyway, IMO. It all depends on whether the bad guys have an A team left to send against the US or not. Hard to say after 10+ years of real costly attrition war.

CNN has filmed an interesting video that shows just how easy it is to climb into a jets wheel well...

Don't bother clicking the play button, these are NOT imbedded, see link below...

It's not hard at all" to climb inside the wheel well, said Jose Wolfman Guillen, a ground operations coordinator at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. "You can grab onto the struts and landing 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 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."

"On a 767 and other wide bodies, there are small latched 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." www.cnn.com...

a reply to: Wrabbit2000

It all depends on whether the bad guys have an A team left to send against the US or not.

Well if rumors are correct and the Administration did eliminate Seal team members to keep them quiet, then you may have to look closer to home for the right guys.

It is getting murky!

No matter how much security you throw at a problem, it always come back to failure by humans. Nearing the end of a long shift, who missed seeing the kid jump the fence on monitor 7.

Someone did and someone always will! After a while of nothing ever happening, complacency sets in and security fails the one time it is needed.

As you said, even the SS can't keep AF1 safe.

Other countries have highly trained operatives, many of them!

P

a reply to: pheonix358

You know, I have no clue why we still rely on human eyeballs to security cameras as the primary means of catching a problem? It's silly... One thing I learned a long time ago. A human being can watch those screens for only so long before something right in front of them will be missed on the 'we see what we expect to see' phenomenon.

I have a $20 webcam with software that didn't cost much more running my carport security here. It's not what I'd recommend for an airport of course..lol... but it's capable of seeing people well enough to distinguish from across the screen on a new moon, given the ambient city light to enhance. It detects motion by simple pixel analysis in real time to see how many pixels changed. Not some IR or Thermal motion that can be faked by slow movement or other ways...but pixel comparison. Fool that one without expenses which would make other means better anyway.

This kid should never ..ever...have been able to do this, the more I think of it. It won't take billions and a new agency or a new press worthy program. It'll take some new software..or MORE likely, config changes to what they already have and a very blunt statement to the labor people who won't be happy 'Deal with it..or go stand the post yourself'.

That would do wonders.

originally posted by: Wrabbit2000
a reply to: pheonix358

You know, I have no clue why we still rely on human eyeballs to security cameras as the primary means of catching a problem? It's silly... One thing I learned a long time ago. A human being can watch those screens for only so long before something right in front of them will be missed on the 'we see what we expect to see' phenomenon.

I have a $20 webcam with software that didn't cost much more running my carport security here. It's not what I'd recommend for an airport of course..lol... but it's capable of seeing people well enough to distinguish from across the screen on a new moon, given the ambient city light to enhance. It detects motion by simple pixel analysis in real time to see how many pixels changed. Not some IR or Thermal motion that can be faked by slow movement or other ways...but pixel comparison. Fool that one without expenses which would make other means better anyway.

This kid should never ..ever...have been able to do this, the more I think of it. It won't take billions and a new agency or a new press worthy program. It'll take some new software..or MORE likely, config changes to what they already have and a very blunt statement to the labor people who won't be happy 'Deal with it..or go stand the post yourself'.

That would do wonders.

What might help is if the airplanes themselves were outfitted with cameras with a satellite link up. Hey, if we are doing the full security thing, then let's go all the way.

I do fly and now it makes me feel less safe knowing someone could do this. One issue I have with the media reporting things like this and other things like how people make bombs, why not just tell them how to do it?

At least no one could replicate the experiment of creating nuclear radiation in their oven.

a reply to: Murgatroid

I saw that CNN video this morning. Quite funny. The reporter states, then shows, to get in the wheel well a person climbs on a tire, up some struts and says the person crosses over and up into the well.

Then he get down, walks to the door, grabs the top and pulls himself into the well. Guess he finally figured out the easier way.

Haven't read everything yet but the TSA is not really responsible for external security at airports. By external I mean edge or perimeter security on the airport grounds.
Local police or airport security have that function.
I understand people hate the TSA but I also like the truth and this case those pointing fingers at the TSA don't seem to be angry at the right group.