Stowaway in the Landing Gear

The thrilling story of a teen who made a daring escape from Cuba—in the frigid belly of a transatlantic DC-8 jet

- Armando Socarras Ramirez

The jet engines of the Iberia Airlines DC-8 thundered in an earsplitting crescendo as the big plane taxied towards where we huddled in the tall grass just off the end of the runway at Havana’s José Martí Airport. For months, my friend Jorge Pérez Blanco and I had been planning to stow away in a wheel well on this flight, No. 904, Iberia’s weekly non-stop run from Havana to Madrid. Now, in the late afternoon of 3 June 1969, our moment had come.

We realized that we were pretty young to be taking such a big gamble; I was 17, Jorge 16. But we were both determined to escape from Cuba, and our plans had been made carefully. We knew that departing airliners taxied to the end of the 11,500-foot runway, stopped momentarily after turning around, and then roared at full throttle down the runway to take off. We wore rubber-soled shoes to aid us in crawling up the wheels and carried ropes to secure ourselves inside the wheel well. We had also stuffed cotton in our ears as protection against the shriek of the four jet engines. Now we lay sweating with fear as the massive craft swung into its about-face, the jet blast flattening the grass all around us. “Let’s run!” I shouted to Jorge.

We dashed on to the runway and sprinted towards the left-hand wheels of the momentarily stationary plane. As Jorge began to scramble up the 42-inch-high tyres, I saw there was not room for us both in the single well. “I’ll try the other side!” I shouted. I climbed quickly on to the right wheels, grabbed a strut and, twisting and wriggling, pulled myself into the semi-dark well. The plane began rolling immediately, and I grabbed some machinery to keep from falling out. The roar of the engines nearly deafened me.