The teenage stowaway who made it from California to Hawaii in the wheel well of a Boeing 767 beat some very long odds to survive, experts say. At 38,000 feet, the boy—who authorities now say is 15, not 16 as earlier reported—had to survive extremely thin air as well as temperatures as low as 80 below zero. There was also the risk of falling out, or being crushed by moving parts of the landing gear. "It's amazing," a curator at the National Air and Space Museum tells NBC. "He's very, very lucky to be alive. Something like that happens only once in a long time." Most people wouldn't last more than a few minutes at that altitude, he says, and the "few survivors almost all have been very young males who were presumably fairly fit." More:
- The teen survived thanks to a fluke of conditions where it "got cold enough to protect his brain, but not cold enough to stop his heart," director of the Institute for Altitude Medicine tells the Washington Post. The boy almost certainly spent almost the entire flight unconscious in a hibernation-like state, he says.