(CNN) The first sign something was off was when the ground crew at Kahului Airport in Maui noticed a

(CNN) The first sign something was off was when the ground crew at Kahului Airport in Maui noticed a boy wandering the tarmac, dazed and confused. The story he told officials was even more incredible.
He hopped an airport fence, ran to the plane and climbed onto Hawaii Airlines Flight 45, the FBI said. Once confident that the teen did not present a threat, the FBI dropped out of the investigation.
It appears that this teenager scaled a section of our perimeter, nascar ticket brokers Mineta San Jose International 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.
He certainly is. As unlikely as it sounds, officials believe the boy rode in the tiny, cramped compartment for almost nascar ticket brokers five hours, at altitudes that reached 38,000 feet, without oxygen and under subzero temperatures.
But some people have survived. Since 1947, 105 people are known to have attempted nascar ticket brokers to fly inside wheel wells on 94 flights worldwide, the Federal Aviation Administration s Civil Aerospace Medical nascar ticket brokers 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 nascar ticket brokers feet.
Someone could slip into unconsciousness so that the body cools and the central nervous system nascar ticket brokers is preserved, said CNN aviation expert Michael Kay. Also, he said, there could be a situation where inside nascar ticket brokers 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.
Surveillance camera footage shows the boy hopping the fence at Mineta San Jose International Airport, the FBI said.. There s also camera footage of him walking across nascar ticket brokers the ramp in San Jose toward the Hawaiian nascar ticket brokers aircraft, the airport said.
Video is under review by federal and local law enforcement officials here, said airport spokeswoman Barnes. And we ll continue to review that to determine where, in fact, the teenager was able to scale the fence line.
Clearly there s a big security nascar ticket brokers breach here, which in the post 9/11 world order is a concern, said Kay, the aviation nascar ticket brokers expert. To get past all sorts of people apparently unnoticed is a physical feat, he said.
Also, the wheel well is filled with equipment nascar ticket brokers 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.
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. nascar ticket brokers 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 nascar ticket brokers out. If you fell out, you could get horribly mangled or dragged nascar ticket brokers 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. nascar ticket brokers I wouldn t know how to do it.
The most recent known case of someone surviving 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. nascar ticket brokers The ride lasted nascar ticket brokers only 35 minutes, and the plane likely went no higher than 25,000 feet.