Flying

Standing on the road near one end of San Salvador's Ilopango Airport one afternoon last week, Felix Lara, 24, an Indian laborer, watched a Pan American Airways Constellation taxi out for the take-off to Honduras. Just as the plane started to roll, Felix vaulted the airport fence, leaped up on the axle housing of the right main landing wheel, and flung his arms around the fat supporting strut.

Down the runway they sped, Felix and the Constellation. The blast from the right inboard engine whipped his tattered shirt, but Felix only curled his bare toes tighter around the housing. Spectators at the terminal building spotted the figure behind the strut, and gestured in mute horror as the plane sped by. Joseph Hernandez, the flight steward, caught the meaning of their signals just in time to see the big double wheel leave the ground, with Felix still clinging tight, and fold forward into the wing.

After the wheel doors closed up, Felix was comfortable, though cramped. "It was nice to get out of the wind," he recalled later. But when Captain J. W.

Strickland got word of the stowaway, he circled immediately to land. Coming in, he lowered the wheels with a sick feeling that he would probably drop Felix 1,500 feet to his death. Felix did lose his foot hold for a moment, but he dangled by his arms until the strut came vertical and he could again stand. Captain Strickland set the Connie down so gently that Felix scarcely bounced.

"Why did we come back?" Felix asked the people who rushed out to the plane.

To the airport cops who arrested him, he explained that he was broke, out of work and hungry. He had hoped that wherever the plane took him he might learn to read and write, then become a pilot. "I'm going to grab that animal again, when they let me go," he promised.