JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Bored on a hot summer day, three Florida youngsters were sitting around when one sent a text message to another with an adventurous idea.
“Hey do you want to go 2 Tennessee today,” the message read.
“Sure,” the other responded.
Not even old enough to get a driver’s license, they took a taxi to the airport Tuesday, bought tickets with babysitting money and — unbeknown to their parents, the three (ages 15, 13 and 11) — boarded a Southwest Airlines flight from Jacksonville to Nashville, Tenn., according to a TV news account of the incident.
Nobody asked a question. Nobody asked for identification.
Not the taxi driver. Not the ticket counter. Not security officials or flight attendants or other passengers. So when they landed in Nashville with just $40 left and their destination, Dollywood, hundreds of miles away, they called home.
The jig was up.
“I just wanted to fly,” Bridget Brown, 15, told WJXX-TV in Jacksonville. “I had the money.”
Southwest Airlines said the company’s policy on minors is similar to other carriers’ in that it covers children ages 5-11 traveling alone, and that the 11-year-old in this case was accompanied by two older companions. The Transportation Security Administration does not require anyone younger than 18 to show identification.
It is still unclear whether any of the three should have been allowed to purchase tickets. A Southwest spokesman did not immediately return a message seeking comment on that issue.
Messages left by The Associated Press on Friday at the families’ homes were not immediately returned.
Richard Bloom, an aviation security expert at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla., said although this incident amounted to a childhood jaunt, it highlights legitimate safety implications.
“The moral of the story is, at least in other parts of the world, young people are engaged in weapons, planting bombs, testing security,” he said. “The point is terrorist groups, insurgent groups, other kinds of transnational groups, what have you, they read the papers, they watch TV, they look at the security lapses.”
