Boy, 9, sneaks onto plane and travels almost 2,000 miles

An 9-year-old globetrotter has been reunited with his family after he snuck onto an airplane and traveled almost 2,000 miles across the country alone.

Brazilian boy Emanuel Marques de Oliveira was reported missing by his parents in the city of Manaus on Saturday morning.

Oliveira’s mother, Daniele Marques, told authorities her son was snuggled in his bed when she awoke in the early hours of the morning. However, when she went to check on him again two hours later, he had vanished.

“I woke up at 5:30 am, went to his room, and saw that he was sleeping normally,” she later told Newsflash. “Then I fiddled with my mobile phone a little and got up again, at 7:30 a.m., and that is when I realized that he was no longer in his bedroom and I started to panic.”

The aspiring traveler reportedly snuck out of his house and made his way to a nearby airport, where he boarded a plane without a ticket.

Audacious Oliveira had Googled “how to get on a plane unnoticed,” according to local media reports.

The boy traveled 1,677 miles on a Latam flight from Manau, in the northwest of Brazil, to the city of Guarulhos, which is located in the southeast state of Sao Paulo.

His distraught mother spent the whole day wondering where her child was before finally learning that Oliveira was safe and well on the other side of the country.

Manaus airport management are currently investigating how the boy was able to board a plane with no travel documents and no luggage.

Local police have also requested security camera images from the airport and have initiated an investigation, according to local media reports.

They say there is no history of violence in the family and that the intrepid boy had simply decided to travel to Sao Paulo to visit some of his other family members.

The cross-country trip comes just two years after a similar story from the US made headlines around the world.

Back in January 2020, Sade Subbs, 15, made it through a TSA checkpoint at the Orlando International Airport with a stranger’s boarding pass.

She was later apprehended, telling authorities that “she just wanted to fly in an airplane.”