Within the last seven months, two children have managed to fly across the nation without an airplane ticket and were not stopped and questioned by airport security. Is the TSA taking enough caution to prevent children and other passengers from sneaking on to planes?

In Oct.,  a 9-year-old boy snuck on to a plane from Minneapolis to Las Vegas. He went through security with all other passengers, but officials still do not know how he managed to get on the plane without a ticket. More recently, on April 20, a 16-year-old boy snuck into the wheel well of an airplane and made it to Hawaii alive.

This is an incredibly dangerous situation and these children should not have been able to sneak on the airplane so easily. The 16-year-old boy who recently hid in one of the wheel wells for the main landing gear on the plane from San Jose, Calif, to Maui, Hawaii did not have difficulties jumping the fence.

According to The New York Times, “Jumping a deteriorating airport fence, running across the airport unobserved in the darkness and climbing into the wheel well of a parked Boeing 767 is not all that difficult, according to experts, but surviving the trip is extraordinary.”

These children who were not supposed to be on the flight cloud have been a real threat to the passengers. They could have had intentions similar of the tragedy of 9/11. If it was that easy for just these two children within the last seven months then airport security is not doing its job.

“Clearly there’s a big security breach here, which in the post 9/11 world order is a concern,” said CNN aviation expert Michael Kay. To make it past all different sorts of people unnoticed is “a physical feat,” he said.

The fences around the airport runways need to be able to keep people off the runways and should not be damaged or manageable for people to get onto the runways by climbing them, jumping them or breaking them.

According to The New York Times, the fence on the northwest side of the Mineta San Jose International Airport was falling over in one spot and partly covered by purple and pink bougainvillea bushes.

Richard Marchi, who is a former senior official with Airports Council International, reported to The New York Times, “I probably could have done it when I was 18,” referring to jumping the fence alongside the runway.

Not only is the 16-year-old-boy successfully riding in the wheel well incredibly dangerous for the passengers of the plane, but it is also very dangerous for the boys safety. It is a miracle he survived: cramped in a tiny compartment for almost five hours, at altitudes of 38 thousand feet, without oxygen and in subzero temperatures.

The Federal Aviation Administration’s Civil Aerospace Medical Institute says that since 1947, 105 people are known to have attempted to fly inside wheel wells on 94 flights worldwide and only 25 have survived, a survival rate of only 24 percent.

Although, neither of these boys were threats to the planes, they still were able to get past security and make the flight. How are we to be so sure next time someone sneaks onto a plane they will not have the intentions of replicating the tragic events of 9/11?

Isaac Yeffet, a former head of security for the Israeli airline El Al who now runs his own firm, Yeffet Security Consultants, said that the recent breach shows that U.S. airport security still has weaknesses, despite billions of dollars invested.

U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., who serves on the Homeland Security committee, said on Twitter that this latest incident demonstrates vulnerabilities that need to be addressed. They need to put some tighter airport security measures in place immediately to protect airline travelers.