Plane Stowaway Implies Medical "Miracle," Experts Say

Experts are calling the claim of a boy who says he survived a flight from California to Hawaii in the unpressurized wheel well of a plane either a "miracle," a medical anomaly, or simply a hoax.

According to various reports, a 16 year old boy from Santa Clara , California managed to sneak his way onto the tarmac of the Mineta San Jose International Airport. From there, he claims to have hitched a ride in the wheel well of Hawaiian Airlines flight 45, a Boeing 767 bound for Kahului Airport in Maui, Hawaii.

According to the Washington Post, while there is no footage of the boy actually climbing into the wheel well, the FBI has revealed that there is security footage from San Jose airport of a teenager that fits the boy's description hopping a fence to get to the tarmac Sunday morning.

Roughly 2,300 miles later, the plane landed in Maui at 10:30 am. Around that time, Hawaiian Airlines personal alerted security of a unidentified 16 year old boy who they found wandering around the flight ramp, according to statements from Alison Coyle, a Hawaiian Airlines spokeswomen who spoke with local press on Monday.

While the remarkable story appears to be largely a lesson learned about alarming security holes and general teenage stupidity, there is a second moral to this story.

To have successfully made that daring stowaway trip, the teenager would had to have survived 80 degrees below zero temperatures at an altitude of 38,000 feet, cramped in the plane's unpressurized wheel well for five-and-a-half hours.

"[This is] one of three things - a hoax, a miracle or we're going to have to rewrite the textbooks if he actually did what he says he did," aviation consultant John Nance told the San Francisco Chronicle Monday morning.

Nance says that the action-movie-like feat pulled by this teenager is "not supposed to be possible."

However, a study on airplane wheel-well stowaways conducted by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) between 1947 and 1993 details how five of 13 confirmed stowaways actually survived unpressurized journeys that exposed them to deadly conditions.

According to the study, all five of the survivors were exposed to conditions standard for 30,000 to 35,000  feet off the ground. One stowaway traveling from Panama City to Miami, Florida survived being in an unpressurized compartment 39,000 feet above the ground.

According to observational data, nearly half the stowaways who died were found frozen to death, sometimes blacking out after experiencing hypoxia -- a oxygen deprivation condition common at high altitudes. It is theorized that for the survivors, exposure to fatally freezing temperatures somehow put their body in a protective state of hibernation, using markedly less oxygen to function, until the plane dropped back down to more comfortable conditions. This phenomenon, while rare, is no "miracle" and has even been seen among high-altitude mountain climbers.

It may be that this is what the 16 year old boy went through to survive his reckless journey. However, the FBI and airline officials are still investigating the matter.

The FAA study was published in Human Factors & Aviation Medicine on May 1997.