Security breaches leave passengers angry

In the past month, both Newark Liberty International Airport and John F. Kennedy (JFK) International Airport have had major security breaches. Terminals had to be shut down and evacuated while planes were held up for hours. Many passengers were delayed and after evacuating their terminals, they had to be put through security screenings again.

These unrelated instances were neither attacks on airlines, planes or passengers. One was a goodbye kiss to a departing companion. While a security officer was distracted, Rutgers University graduate student Haisong Jiang passed under a security rope at Newark Airport for a kiss, only to then find himself the cause of hours upon hours of delays.

According The New York Times this led the airport to a delay of 1,600 passengers along with a massive search for Jiang. He was found hours later at a gym and the police waited for him to come home before arresting him. The New York Times also reported that he was charged with defiant trespassing by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the penalty being a maximum of 30 days in jail.

At JFK Airport, a Haitian man named Jules Paul Bouloute was heading back to New York after the devastating earthquake that recently happened in his home country.

Bouloute was in Haiti visiting while the earthquake hit and his trip back to his wife in the United States took him through the Dominican Republic and Orlando, Fla. before coming to New York. While trying to exit the terminal he ended up walking through a door marked “employees’ entrance” The New York Times reported.

Bouloute’s mistake then led to a similar Newark Airport lock down. Planes were delayed, passengers held and airlines lost money. American Airlines lost $10 million dollars to be exact and 4,000 passengers were affected according to The New York Times.

The penalty for Bouloute’s actions will cost him charges of felony criminal tampering in the first degree and many lower level counts of trespassing with a possibility of up to seven years in prison.

The security breaches happened two weeks apart and they also followed the recent terrorist attack upon a plane flying from Amsterdam to Detroit during Christmas. The man caught had suspected links to the terrorist group Al Qaeda.

The New York Daily News reported that at Newark Airport there will be two guards stationed at every terminal exit versus the previous one security guard.

New Jersey Senator Frank R. Lautenberg had spoken on the subject stating in a press release, “The TSA's failure to prevent someone from breaching a secure area of Newark Liberty Airport is completely unacceptable...I'm going to close these gaps in our homeland security shield. The flying public needs assurance they are safe when they step onto an aircraft.”