After being caught wandering around a restricted area of Heathrow and being sent back to the US, the 17-year-old Bostonian, Abraham Derman, told investigators that he wanted to go to Israel and had hoped that the stunt would help to get him a job with Mossad.
According to the Boston Globe, Abraham said that on July 12 he had cut through razor wire at the city's Logan airport and walked unchallenged across the tarmac, before climbing an outside staircase to enter a covered gangway leading to a BA Boeing 747.
He then took an economy-class seat and, after a passenger arrived to claim that, moved to a business-class seat.
Security on the gangway, which should have been secured by a combination lock, is the responsibility of the airline. John Lampl, a BA spokesman, described the incident as "a bizarre, one-in-a-million happening".
"We are conducting a full-scale investigation in cooperation with Massport [the Massachusetts port authority] and the FAA [federal aviation administration]," he said.
