3 kids buy tickets, fly alone to Tennessee

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Bored on a hot summer day, three Florida youngsters were sitting around when one sent a text message to another with an idea.

"Hey do you want to go 2 Tennessee today," the message read.

"Sure," the other responded.

The youngsters — ages 15, 13 and 11 — took a taxi to the airport Tuesday, bought tickets with baby-sitting money and without their parents' knowledge boarded a Southwest Airlines flight from Jacksonville to Nashville, according to a TV news account.

Nobody asked a question. Nobody asked for identification.

Not the taxi driver. Not the ticket-counter agent. Not security officials or flight attendants or other passengers. When the three landed in Nashville with just $40 left and their destination, Dollywood, hundreds of miles away, they finally called home.

"I just wanted to fly," Bridget Brown, 15, told WJXX-TV in Jacksonville. "I had the money."

Their parents are wondering how the trip was possible.

Southwest Airlines said the company's policy on minors is similar to other carriers in that it covers children ages 5 through 11 traveling alone, and that the 11-year-old in this case was accompanied by two older companions. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) does not require anyone younger than 18 to show identification, but all bags are still screened.

It is unclear if any of the three should have been allowed to purchase tickets.

In an age of heightened security and terrorism threats, some were concerned that three youngsters could so easily board an airline without parental consent.

Richard Bloom, an aviation-security expert at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla., said that while this was 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. And they take that information as they develop their own terrorist operations and anti-government operations."

Sari Koshetz, a TSA spokeswoman, dismissed the idea that children would have an easier time of getting weapons onto a plane than anyone else.

"Our mission is to make sure that all passengers, regardless of age, are screened thoroughly," Koshetz said.

The three youngsters had no problem hopping a flight.

Brown, with the $700 she had saved, took her 11-year-old brother, Kodie, and friend Bobby Nolan III, 13, to the airport in the afternoon. She said she purchased the three tickets at the Southwest Airlines counter without any problems from the clerk.

"He said OK and told us how much it would be and then we paid him," Brown said. "Then he put the flight things on our bags, and then he said, 'You better run because you might miss your flight.' "

No issues at security, either.

"We just took our stuff out of our pockets, took our shoes off and walked through it," Nolan told the TV station. "And they didn't say nothing."

The three arrived in Nashville and, realizing their plan was flawed, finally 'fessed up.

Their parents came home from work and thought the kids were out playing. They had left messages on the children's cellphones that went unreturned. When their children phoned from Nashville, they were scared.

Nashville airport spokeswoman Emily Richard said the children never left the airport property and were immediately rebooked on return flights that night. Southwest said it has refunded their airfare.