Slovak Man Breaches Airport Security, Found Sleeping on Parked Austrian Airlines Jet
A 50-year-old man wandered unchallenged through Košice International Airport for hours, climbed the perimeter fence, and boarded an empty aircraft before being discovered by arriving crew members.
A substantial security lapse at Slovakia's Košice International Airport allowed an unauthorized individual to breach multiple protective barriers and board a parked Austrian Airlines aircraft overnight, where flight crew discovered him asleep in a premium cabin seat early Thursday morning.
The incident unfolded over several hours beginning around 1 a.m. on July 23, when the 50-year-old Slovak national entered the public terminal and helped himself to refreshments at shuttered concessions that were blocked with furniture rather than properly secured. After a brief encounter with an airport worker who believed the man had departed the facility, he instead located an unsupervised section of perimeter fencing and climbed over into the restricted airside zone.
The intruder then spent nearly sixty minutes moving about the apron unchallenged before discovering an Embraer E195LR that had arrived from Vienna the previous evening. Mobile boarding stairs remained positioned at the forward entry, and though the door was closed, it was reportedly not locked. He opened it himself, entered the cabin, and settled into the first row before falling asleep.
Austrian Airlines crew members arriving after 4 a.m. to prepare the return flight to Vienna found their unexpected passenger and immediately alerted authorities. When the captain roused him, the man reportedly asked, "Are we flying already?" He carried no ticket or identification, and airport officials indicated he displayed signs of mental distress.
The discovery triggered mandatory security protocols under European aviation regulations, requiring a comprehensive search when unauthorized access occurs. Police deployed a pyrotechnician and explosives-detection canine to inspect the aircraft, finding no dangerous materials. The scheduled 5:25 a.m. departure was delayed until 7:36 a.m., though the two-hour-eleven-minute delay fell short of the threshold for passenger compensation under EU261 rules.
The breach exposed failures across multiple security layers, from inadequately secured terminal concessions to unmonitored perimeter fencing and an extended period of apron access without detection. While aviation security standards do not mandate that every door on a parked aircraft remain locked, they require alternative protective measures that clearly failed in this instance.