Graduation Trip A Wild Ride Of Alcohol, Sex -- Tour To Mexico Under Investigation

EUGENE - A teenager's trip after high-school graduation with a travel company specializing in student tours to Mexico turned into a wild ride involving alcohol and sex, she told The Register-Guard.

Sara Walker said a male flight attendant broke out the bottled water for a wet T-shirt contest after the June 11 charter took off from Portland.

She said she could hardly believe it when the five wet young women piled into the cockpit with the flight crew.

"Here we have 153 wild and crazy students, an unprofessional flight crew, unprofessional flight attendants leading a wet T-shirt contest," Walker said. "I thought, who the hell's responsible for the safety of the aircraft?"

The Federal Aviation Administration is asking the same question about the Falcon Air flight from Portland to Mazatlan, chartered by recent high-school graduates, most of them from Eugene or Springfield.

Brandon Beemer, an 18-year-old Eugene high-school graduate, said he videotaped the goings-on, and sold the tape to "Inside Edition" for $10,000.

"I got `Inside Edition,' `Hard Copy' and `Extra' all calling me," Beemer said. A spokeswoman for King World Productions in New York said its syndicated show, "Inside Edition," is working on the story, but she wouldn't say whether the show paid for the videotape.

Walker's mother, Vicki Walker, a court reporter in Eugene, made copies of the videotape and sent one to the FAA. She allowed a reporter to view the copy she kept.

The tape shows five female teenage passengers emerging from the cockpit during the flight. A young male passenger pours bottled water on their chests, taking directions from a uniformed male flight attendant who is speaking over the plane's public-address system.

When the flight attendant pronounces the young women's shirts sufficiently wet, they file back into the cockpit.

Sara Walker said the wild flight only foreshadowed worse things to come from Cerkvenik-Anderson Travel, the Phoenix-based company that arranged the "Grad Blowout '98" trip to the Mexican seaside resort under the name Student Tours.

Travelers who paid for two-person rooms got stuck in four-person rooms, Walker said. Towels weren't supplied, and fresh bedding was hard to find.

Worse, she said, all the events organized by Student Tours revolved around alcohol and sex.

"I knew there would be drinking, and I knew that partying would go on, but I also expected other activities to be offered. There was nothing but sex and alcohol," Walker said.

Cerkvenik-Anderson Travel did not respond to telephone and e-mail messages about the allegations. Representatives of Falcon Air declined to return telephone calls to the company's Miami headquarters.

The travel company has dealt with complaints before. In 1989, an 18-year-old Arizona student died during a Student Tours trip to Mazatlan. He tumbled off the balcony of his fifth-floor hotel room after a night of drinking. The same year, an 18-year-old on another Student Tours trip to Mexico died after falling off a train.