Cross-dressing man caught on Newark runways

The Port Authority’s pricy perimeter-protection system failed again Wednesday when it failed to detect that a man — dressed as woman — had hopped a fence at Newark Airport and wandered across two runways, sources told The Post.

Siyah Bryant, 24, of Jersey City, was wearing women’s red pants and a smart brown sweater as he allegedly walked onto the tarmac at about 4:20 a.m. after tryst in a car near the airport went bad.

OK, it’s the New York Post, so they are yukking it up about the cross dressing man on a date. Not to mention “running out of gas”. Which is a cliche from the 1930s.

All of that aside, you’d think that a system of cameras and detectors that we paid $300,000,000.00 for would detect a person crossing over the perimeter. This guy wasn’t even trying to evade the system and it couldn’t even catch him. Imagine what would happen if someone who wanted to get in and cause damage would have been able to do.

He allegedly scaled the security fence and rambled unnoticed across two runways before trying to enter Terminal C, where he was confronted by a United Airlines worker, who called cops.

So an airline employee found him after he’d wandered around a bit and then tried to enter the terminal. Again, imagine what this guy could have done if he had a gun. Or a knife for that matter.

And it also tainted a qualified success for the PIDS system earlier this week.

At JFK, it helped PA cops nab an intruder who had scaled a fence and went onto an airport roadway.

Personnel for PIDS — now operating at JFK, La Guardia, Newark and Teterboro airports — spotted an emotionally disturbed Wisconsin man Sunday afternoon after he climbed over a fence near Rockaway Boulevard and walked between two runways half a mile away, sources said.

Makhonjwa Mashoba, 31, of Milwaukee, was taken into custody, though even that came after a delay of some 10 minutes, sources said.

“Qualified success”?

You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means. This does not qualify as a success on any level. So, the contractor operates the system for the airports. Either the system does not work as advertised, the contractors don’t know how to work it, or the cops are ignoring alarms from the contractor. Anyway you slice it, what we have here is a multi layer onion of fail.

Don’t worry though, the system will keep us safe. Or at least give us the illusion of being safe at a cost of hundreds of millions of taxpayer money. Or more if every airport now has a similar system guarding its perimeter.

This sure makes driving everywhere a more appealing alternative.