Recent wind tunnel studies have shown that an aeroelastic system, prior to losing stability through flutter, goes through a regime where the response is characterized by intermittent bursts of periodic oscillations. The focus of this study is to investigate the reasons for this intermittent behavior through a numerical model. The studies indicate that the intermittency is observed only when the flow is accompanied by small random fluctuations. A stochastic bifurcation analysis is carried out to gain an understanding for this phenomenological interesting behavior. © 2016 The Authors.