A man climbed an 8-foot barbed-wire fence at a maintenance facility near Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, boarded a parked JetBlue plane and slept for a few hours in its rear restroom. Employees found him there. The case is back in the news as Broward County reviews who should run airport security.
What Actually Happened
According to CBS12, which cited the Broward Sheriff’s Office, a 32-year-old man scaled an 8-foot fence topped with barbed wire and got into a restricted area. The area was not near the terminal. Once inside, he walked up a set of portable stairs beside the aircraft, boarded the plane and fell asleep in the restroom at the back of the cabin for a few hours. Employees discovered him, and he was arrested.
CBS12 revisited the incident on September 28 as part of a wider look at perimeter breaches at South Florida airports. Perimeter security at the Fort Lauderdale airport is handled by the Broward Sheriff’s Office. The Broward County Commission has been discussing whether to move airport security duties to a dedicated airport law enforcement agency, and the commission was subpoenaed by the Office of Statewide Prosecution as part of that discussion.
The Detection Gap
An 8-foot fence with barbed wire slows a person down and marks the line, but in the public account the first people to learn about the intrusion were the employees who found him on the plane, a few hours after the climb.
Remote airside areas such as maintenance hangars and cargo ramps sit far from the terminal and see little foot traffic at night. Cameras cover many of these areas, and they are the right tool for seeing who is there and what they are doing. A camera still has to be watched or told where to look, and its view depends on placement, distance, lighting and weather. On a long fence line, the operator also needs to know which section to look at.
How IRONCLAD Addresses This
IRONCLAD is a fence-mounted vibration sensor. A sensor cable with a built-in steel mesh layer is attached along the existing fence fabric, and a processor analyzes the vibration it picks up. It is designed to detect three attacks on a fence: cutting it, lifting it and climbing over it.
At a site like this one, the cable would run along the fence line around the maintenance area, divided into zones of up to 1,000 feet each. When a person put his weight on the fence and started up the fence, the processor would read the sharp vibration of the climb and trip that zone’s relay. The relay can drive an alarm panel, a VMS or a camera call-up, so dispatch would get the zone and a live view while the person was still on the fence or just over it. In this case, that alert would have come at the start of the incident, a few hours before employees found him on the plane.
IRONCLAD separates intrusion from weather by filtering out the low-frequency vibration caused by wind and rain, and it adjusts its alarm threshold in real time for wind. Sensitivity is set per zone, so a stretch of fence beside a busy service road can be tuned apart from a quiet back line. Each zone still needs testing at commissioning. The sensor covers the fence it is mounted on, so a gate left open or a person who enters through a building is a separate problem. An alert also needs someone to answer it.
What Facility Owners Should Ask
If someone climbed our fence at 2 a.m. behind the hangars, how would we know, and how long would it take? Which fence sections are out of a guard’s or a camera operator’s line of sight for most of the night? When a camera shows a person on the ramp, does anything tell the operator where to look first? Who receives a fence alarm, and how fast can they put eyes on that zone?
The Bottom Line
In Fort Lauderdale, the intrusion came to light when employees found him on the plane. A sensor on the fence would have reported it at the climb, while a camera confirmed who was there. To review a layout for your own perimeter, contact RBtec.
