In a stunning, sublime act of teen dirtbaggery, after an argument with his parents (which we can only pray was about fine ham) this weekend, a San Jose teenager ran away from home by hopping the fence and stowing away in the wheel well of a plane bound for Hawaii.
The FBI is calling it a “miracle” and the airline says a teen who hopped the fence at a San Jose airport is “lucky to have survived” a 5-hour flight to Maui — in the wheel well of a Boeing 767.
The 16-year-old stowaway survived temperatures as low as 80 degrees below zero and the thin air available at 38,000 feet, FBI spokesman Tom Simon said.
“He was unconscious for the lion’s share of the flight,” said Simon. “Kid’s lucky to be alive.”
Security video indicated the teen was able to breach San Jose’s Mineta International Airport security on Sunday and climb undetected into the wheel well of Hawaiian Airlines Flight 45.
“Yeah, I fucking knew it was Easter,” the teen presumably added during his interview. “I don’t care. I’ll run away on Easter. They’re a bunch of fucking fascists.”
“I passed out pretty fast, though, so the ride wasn’t even that big of a deal. People made such a big deal out of it, but whatever,” he almost certainly continued, looking tough as shit. “Wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t lost my Luckies somewhere over Catalina.”
Officials confirmed that the teen reportedly planned to return home by skateboarding across the Pacific.
[Image almost certainly not of the actual teen dirtbag in question]
Tags: flying, heroes, hopping fences, no big deal, runaways, stowaways, teenage dirtbags, teens
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Fear of a Teen Planet
I just can’t even picture the wheel well of a plane, let alone how you’d fit into one. (would you not fall out when the landing gear was being raised and lowered?
nope. you fall out. a lot. especially because at altitudes/freezing temperatures you black out and aren’t aware when the landing gear is deployed, often like 1500 feet in the air during descent. The piece at the Awl about this was pretty ghastly and now I feel sort of frightened of bodies falling out of the sky. Heebie jeebies for sure.
I read somewhere that this in fact happened in London a couple of years ago. Just a guy, randomly falling from the sky, you know, nbd. *wince*
I’ve got two “tickets” to Honolulu baby
Come with me Sunday, don’t say maybe
I’m just a stowaway dirtbag, baby, like you
That’s commitment to the lifestyle right there.
File under “proof that 16 year olds are, in fact, invincible.”
Does this make Colton Harris-Moore the king of teen dirtbags?
Psh, like teenage dirtbags would ever recognize the authority of a king.
I’m afraid to fly INSIDE OF A PLANE and this kid SAT ON THE DAMN WHEELS
Oh my God I thought you wrote this as like a satirized Onion piece. I didn’t realize this was REAL.
That is indeed dirtbagtastic.
“Fucking whatever, man. I’m a fucking adult, why they gotta ride my shit, it’s just a fucking calculus grade. Jesus. I’m gonna go to Hawaii and fucking live on the beach and smoke weed. That’ll show them.”
I’m pretty sure this was his actual reasoning.
Dirtbag teens don’t take calculus. He was probably failing Consumer Math.
Ohhhh, man. I’m just far enough away from 16 to be embarrassed-in-hindsight about my tweenage/teenage running-away plans, so can we talk about that? I had perfect plans, and just enough money under my mattress to get to Cincinnati, and absolutely no plans about what I would do once I got there. I think I believed I could get a job washing dishes and sustain myself on that?
Where and how would you have run away? Or better yet, if you actually did run away, please tell all about it!
I was very much a My Side of the Mountain-type daydreamer.
So was I, but I never lived close enough to any mountains to realize those dreams 🙁
I still want a falcon though.
I still use that book in leather classes. DID U KNO: Tannin.
That’s where I learned it!
I still am a lot of the time.
Do you hike? I go solo most of the time. It puts me in that headspace.
Exploding trees.
I was going to run away to go to prom (and possibly get Secret Married) with my long-distance boyfriend from church camp — my mom had said I couldn’t, so I had told him, “Look, hold on, I definitely want to go with you, maybe I can work something out,” and started pricing Greyhound tickets and making plans. Then I called him, all excited, to let him in on this plan, and he said, “Oh. I asked this girl from my math class instead.”
Awww MAN. Did he Secret Marry her?
I know a woman who wishes she had gone to the parents of a friend and said, “My dad yells at me every day. Everything I do is wrong, according to him, no matter how hard I try. I memorize his rules and meet every one of them. But he comes up with new ones to show me I failed. Sometimes he hits me. I have never felt protected. Please may I live in your house until I can go to college?”
She was an honor student and every adult she knew thought she was a perfect kid. She was. She tried so hard. She didn’t know, as a teen, that other adults would help her. She kept quiet for fear her dad would find out about her complaints and punish her more.
Oh. Close to home.
I’m sure it still hurts. But I hope it hurts less now. Are you OK?
Yes, thank you. I hope your friend is too. Give her my best.
My running away dreams were all Mixed up Files style, straight to a fancy museum!
I still fantasize about running away sometimes, just leaving and not telling anyone where I’m going. But at my age, it’s less “charming” and more “there are some serious issues here.” :-/
At age 6, I decided I was fed up with the amount of attention I wasn’t getting, thanks to my baby-dirtbag of a brother who was 2 years old then. I “ran away” to my next-door neighbors’ house (she had a really cool doll collection in her pleasantly musty smelling attic) but made sure to leave a note. I’m pretty sure it said something along the lines of “whenever you decide to actually love me, I will be at the [neighbors’ name] house.”
/dirtbag child
My one teen running away experience (as opposed to my many attempts as a small child) was after I stormed out/was ordered out of the house after an argument with my mom over proper floor-sweeping techniques. After a couple of hours of brainstorming and wandering the streets, I had to concede that as I had no money, no food, and no shoes, I couldn’t figure out how to make a running-away attempt work. I refused to come home unless someone came and asked me to come back, and my figured maybe no one had because they couldn’t find me so I snuck back and spelled out the name of the street I was hanging out on in gravel on the driveway. It turns out no one was at all concerned, but my mom sent my dirtbaggier little sister out to find out what the hell I wanted and I pretended that was like being asked to come home so I did.
I did, in fact, run away.
It was bad. I ended up in some very unpleasant and dangerous situations. I’m not going to go into the details here for a variety of reasons, but I recently realized that my family members don’t have any idea what happened to me during that handful days when I was 14, and that’s a little weird. (“A little weird”? No, that’s everything that was ever wrong with my family in a nutshell.)
Weirder still is that my parents never asked. I got in trouble, and I got yelled at, and I got punished, and I got yanked out of school and moved to private school, and I got a lot of fall-out. But they never sat me down and said “Hey, are you okay?” or “If anything bad happened to you, you can tell us” or even “Why did you do that? What is so bad here?”
They never sent me to a doctor*, they never sent me to a counselor alone, they never gave me a chance to tell any trusted adult privately what had driven me to leave our comfortable home with a bag full of stuff and all the cash I could save, or what happened to me when I did.
That’s mine. That’s my history, and it’s no one else’s business. My family didn’t want to know when it could have done me some good to share it, and I’m not sharing it now for their sordid amusement.
*I’m sure it never occurred to them that their safely middle-class daughter could have been exposed to any real physical danger even on the streets of a city, and they sure weren’t looking to find out that they were wrong.
I’m wicked sorry this happened to you and I hope you’ve been able to get the help/care you need(ed) since then.
My neighbor, her sister, their cousin, and I “ran away” to the camper parked in their driveway. I was the practical, good-girl kid so I thought it was all in jest and was increasingly worried when I would say something like, “When we go back in…” and my neighbor would be like, “We’re NEVER going back in! We’re running AWAY!”
I do not remember how it ended but I don’t live in that camper and neither does she, so I guess we un-ran away at some point.
In other dirtbag news, when I was driving home from work the other day I saw a boy teenager in a big flannel shirt walking down the train tracks with his dog, holding an electric guitar like he might start playing at any time.
My dirtbag sighting this weekend was pretty good, too. I was driving down the road and had to stop because a large herd of dirtbag types had congregated and were taking up the whole road with their milling about. This wasn’t a country road, mine you, this was in the middle of town. After a couple of seconds, one of them looked at me, rolled his eyes, pointed to a back alley that joined up with the next block over, and yelled “go around!”
When I was in Belfast several months ago there kept being packs of teens roaming the streets downtown. Like, serious packs. As in, there was a moment when the bus couldn’t get down the street because the pack of teens was too thick, and the driver had to honk the horn a couple of times before the pack deigned to move. It was ridiculous.
Also at one point on a different Belfast bus ride a pair of teen girl dirtbags got on and played “The Fox” really loudly on their cellphone and sang along. Turns out Belfast is just full of Teens.
I hope you laid on the horn and scared them so bad they peed themselves.
Epic.
So… -80F and low oxygen. This tells me that for the price of an Everest-grade down expedition suit and a rebreather, you’d never have to pay to fly again.
I’m not sure what it says about me that this is the first thing I thought of.
I also started thinking about this! But then I got stuck on the details of security at some airports and the size of the oxygen tank and whether you could haul that up into the wheel well with you…
That’s why I was thinking rebreather, the amount of O2 needed would be much less than for an open circuit system, but the tank would need to be modified to withstand expansion at elevation, I’d think.
Meanwhile, with Dirtbag Teen’s cat:
That cat needs some “Deal with it’ sunglasses.
The college admissions essay practically writes itself.
TEENS.
I am so glad you wrote this because when I saw the headline this morning the only thing I could think was, “what a dirtbag.”
This is amazing and terrifying.
Also I’ve started to use the phrase “dirtbag” at work, and all my coworkers are suitably impressed.