Flight attendants had the shock of their lives when they turned up at an airport in Slovakia to work an early morning regional flight to Vienna, Austria, and found a man asleep in the front row of the airplane. The man had apparently scaled the perimeter security fence of the airport undetected and then broke into the parked airplane, where he remained for several hours.
The incident occurred at Košice International Airport, a small airport in the southeast of Slovakia close to the border with Hungary. Serving only 19 destinations, the airport doesn’t operate any flights late at night, and while most services are closed, the terminal building is still open to the public.
At around 1 am on July 23, the man, aged in his 50s, entered the terminal building and found the airport deserted. He allegedly helped himself to a coffee in a closed cafe and then entered another food concession where he helped himself to some food without paying.
After leaving a mess in the cafe, he carried on wandering the terminal when he bumped into an airport worker. The man is said to have asked the workers about when flights would be leaving, but when she said he would have to wait for the airline counters to open in the morning, he made a gibberish reply and left the terminal.
That is not, however, the end of the story. After walking out of the terminal, the man wandered towards the perimeter security fence that separates the public area of the airport from what is meant to be the secure ‘airside’ part of the airport.
The man managed to scale the fence without being spotted by the security staff, and then wandered the tarmac for nearly an hour. At this point, the man happened upon a parked Austrian Airlines Embraer E190, which had operated the last flight from Vienna to Košice, and was spending the night at the airport in preparation for the early morning return flight to Austria.
The man climbed a set of mobile airstairs that were still attached to the side of the aircraft and managed to open the main cabin door, giving him access to the cabin.
Hours later, at around 4 am, the Austrian Airlines pilots and flight attendants arrived at the airport to prepare the plane for departure back to Vienna. As they boarded the plane, they were shocked to discover the man sleeping in the front row of the aircraft.
When they woke him up, the man even asked them: “Are we flying already?”
The Captain quickly alerted airport staff to the situation, and a security alert was triggered, with a full search of the aircraft ordered, including a bomb detection sniffer dog.
In the end, the aircraft was given the all-clear, but the extensive security protocols meant the return flight OS-654 ended up departing Košice around two hours late.
As for the suspect, local media outlets report that he was found with paperwork on him suggesting he was undergoing psychiatric treatment.
In the past, we’ve heard of flight attendants accidentally leaving sleeping passengers on board planes, with some stranded customers having to go to extreme lengths to get the attention of airport workers, once they’ve woken up to discover they’ve been left on a dark and locked aircraft, parked at a ‘remote’ gate with no jetty or stairs attached.
Incidents where someone has managed to bypass elaborate airport security protocols and get on a parked aircraft are far less common.
These kinds of incidents normally involve environmental protestors who come well prepared to penetrate the secure area of an airport. In 2021, nine Greenpeace activists broke onto the tarmac of Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport and daubed green paint on the side of an Air France Boeing 777.
The activists then climbed on the plane before they were forcibly removed and taken into custody. The authorities claimed that aviation safety was never compromised, as the activists never got near to one of the runways.
