The man told British authorities that he crawled
"under the wire" of the Vienna airport's perimeter fence and climbed
into the undercarriage of a private Boeing 747 parked near a construction site
for a new terminal, Schwechat police chief Leo Lauber said.
Lauber said the jet belonged to a high-ranking official
of the United Arab Emirates and took off from the Austrian capital Sunday night
without any passengers on board.
After landing at London's Heathrow Airport, Lauber said
the man - who claimed he was looking for a job - apparently fell out of the
gear's compartment and was apprehended by police.
A spokesman for London's Metropolitan Police said the man
was arrested and remains in custody at Heathrow. No information on his medical
condition was released, but authorities said he was in a cell, not a medical
facility.
Britain has restrictions on the number of Romanians
working in the UK, even though both nations are in the European Union.
Austria's daily Kurier newspaper reported, without citing
a source, that the stowaway may have survived because the aircraft flew
"well below 32,808 feet" due to bad weather.
Vienna airport spokesman Paul Kleemann said an
investigation into the incident was under way. The man's ability to enter a
reportedly secure airport area undetected raises all sorts of security issues.
The Romanian embassy in London and the Romanian Foreign
Ministry in Bucharest declined to identify the man.
Other airport stowaways have not made it to their
destinations alive.
"Due to specific circumstances of this flight, he is
lucky to have survived, because survival in these cases in quite rare,"
said Sidney Dekker, a professor of flight safety at the School of Aviation at
Sweden's Lund University. "But on another level, this incident also
illustrates the absurdities of security checks."
In February, a man's body was found inside the landing
gear compartment of a Delta Air Lines plane after it landed in Tokyo from New
York. The body had no visible injuries except frostbite and may have died of
hypothermia, authorities said.
In 2007, another man was found dead in the nose gear
wheel well of a United Airlines flight that arrived in San Francisco from
Shanghai.