The boy who fell on the ground (lounge)

Photo magazine life since the 1970s to a 14 year old boy from a Japan Air Lines DC-8 seconds after take-off from Sydney, gear Bay in Australia.

Here in New England we follow strange and passenger aged 16 years Delvonte Tisdale sad history. On 14 November, at the airport in Charlotte, N.C., Tisdale succeeded in climbing detected on the left landing gear Bay a limit of Boston, US Airways 737.

Tisdale was later ejected in Milton, mass., with a height of approximately 2,000 feet aircraft prepares for landing on runway 7.7.2004 at Boston Logan Airport.

A striking incident to ensure, but as these things go you can always count on a politician or a government official to give him a few annoying spin:

"This is a terrible tragedy that he happened to this young man", said attorney William r. Keating. "But if it was a person who has a different reason... If it was a terrorist who could be a bomb was planted, detected." This is very serious.

May I ask why we are unable to discuss anything, especially when that nothing means aircraft, without running any first through the prism of terrorism? This is not a scandal of airport security. This is the story of a young child who have managed to foolishly kill himself.

Delvonte Tisdale infiltrated on the tarmac and himself in the bowels of an aircraft. Mr Keating and others find such unforgivable breach in this era of repression of the Transportation Security Administration. But likes it or not, uncomfortable is that anyone can take probably off such a stunt if he or she wants and attempts to fairly hard.

And remember, not everyone with tarmac access is analysed in the first place. Tisdale apparently bypasses Hall TSA controls on its path in the wheel of the 737 well. Furthermore, people that fed this plan, this plan, catering swept the aisles and loading bags. Except that it legally, through a policy TSA exempts normal security checks field workers. Only passengers, pilots and flight attendants were marched through the metal detectors and x-ray equipment.

It's a loophole media continue to ignore the inexplicably. But did you started me.

The phenomenon of clandestine passengers into the wheel well is nothing new. There were hundreds of cases over the years, usually involving flights from developing countries to the United States or Europe. What makes it so unique is that it was a U.S. domestic flight. According to the FAA, Tisdale was the first passenger wheel household wells in more than 40 years.

If you have never snooped around areas or an aircraft, including a one fuselage, you saw how spacious are gear bays and deceptively "spacious" how they may appear. 747 And 777 is a garage for two cars - size with plenty of corners to hide in a maze of tubes and cables and Struts and pipes. However, the arrays are neither pressure nor heated. There is little oxygen and temperatures at cruising altitudes hover somewhere around of 50 degrees below zero. That you can add total darkness, deafening noise and very good chance to crash to death by the mechanisms of the landing gear retraction. It's worse, even as the coach. Very few runners have survived there.

It is not known with certainty if Tisdale was dead before the doors swung open on Milton. Nevertheless it was not the first boy in tumultuous come of an airliner. There is a famous picture of Life magazine, taken in the 1970s by a named John Gilpin amateur photographer. It shows a year-Australian boy 14, Keith Sapsford, passing a Japan Air Lines DC - gear Bay 8 seconds after take-off from Sydney. Sapsford, who had either slipped, fear, fried or dislodged by a piece of mobile equipment, had hoped to reach the Japan. Gilpin aligned the aircraft fire and had no idea he had captured image after the development of his film.

Library for the preparation of Saint John in Danvers, Massachusetts, where I went to high school, had a collection of related difficult life where was this photo. Countless times I open this page, and stare at it. It's such a transfixing, awesome picture.

History has also shown us modes of Jockey on a safer and more creative plan. There are more famous Frank Abagnale, the notorious fraudster Fame "Catch Me if you CAN" who stole his path in the cockpits with pilot licence a fake. The less known or William Cohn, Florida, at the beginning of the 1980s, went to the world by posing as a Pan Am flight attendant store owner. (I originally wrote about Abagnale and Cohn in this 2007 column.) Cunning Cohn has not been found that the passengers and the co-workers had written several letters of commendation in his name.

Instead of arresting him, he ought to work.

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Another story floating large aircraft is that the FAA had lost it is true that the way tens of thousands of aircraft private property records registered in the United States.

This is clearly an embarrassment for the FAA, but once again, same question: do we really need to see it is a scandal of national security?

A terrorist pourrait, I suppose, get hold of a four seats, this package with explosives and it fly in a building. And that he could do the same thing more or less with a truck or a car or a boat. In addition, keep the best follow-up paperwork property and registration, itself, keep an aircraft to be stolen and used for something nefarious.

As some of you may remember this story, I have no special love for noise and cramped cockpit Cessna and Pipers. But putting screws aircraft - private and private pilots flying-is not only logistically impossible, it would be downright a-American. It is a country with a long and rich heritage of what might be termed "personal aviation." It was Bush planes in the wilds of Alaska, float on mountain - lakes of thousands of them. Their existence is frankly a testament to our freedoms, as is the opportunity for their pilots to fly their - whenever they want, wherever they want - free of the kind of security rules that plague our commercial airports heaviness. Let's keep this way.

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You have any questions to an expert aviation show? Contact Patrick Smith by his website and look for answers in a future column.