The Federal Aviation Administration abruptly halted flights into and out of El Paso International Airport on Tuesday night at 11:30 pm local time (1:30 am EST Wednesday) and said the restrictions would remain in place for 10 days.<\/p>\n
In its notice, the FAA also restricted air space extended in a radius of 10 nautical miles from the airport. Violators were subject to being shot down, the agency said.<\/p>\n
However, less than 10 hours later and without any additional explanation, the FAA ended the restrictions. \u201cThe temporary closure of airspace over El Paso has been lifted,\u201d the federal agency said on social media. \u201cThere is no threat to commercial aviation. All flights will resume as normal.\u201d<\/p>\n
Later on Wednesday morning, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said the decision to close airspace was made to counteract drones from cartels.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe FAA and DOW acted swiftly to address a cartel drone incursion,\u201d Duffy wrote on X. \u201cThe threat has been neutralized, and there is no danger to commercial travel in the region.\u201d<\/p>\n
In announcing the closure on Tuesday night, the FAA offered no explanation for the closure aside from determining that the area was classified as \u201cnational defense airspace,\u201d and adding that the United States government may use \u201cdeadly force\u201d against any airborne aircraft. According to reporting from The New York Times, local officials in El Paso and statewide were not given advance notice for the air space closure.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
Similarly, in announcing an end to the restrictions, the federal agency offered no immediate information to local officials or travelers who were inconvenienced. It is rare for airspace over a major airport to be closed for any extended period.<\/p>\n
The El Paso airport serves more than 3 million customers a month, and according to the 2020 US Census, it lies in the 22nd most populous city in the United States. El Paso is located along the US border with Mexico, across the Rio Grande River from Ciudad Ju\u00e1rez, a city of 1.5 million people.<\/p>\n
The initial lack of communication from federal officials regarding such a disruptive closure, and then its abrupt end, raised serious questions about the coordination among federal agencies, especially if the FAA was making the closure on behalf of another federal body, such as the US Department of Defense.<\/p>\n
This story was updated at 10:50 am ET to reflect the most recent statement from Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Federal Aviation Administration abruptly halted flights into and out of El Paso International Airport on Tuesday night at 11:30 pm local time (1:30 am EST Wednesday) and said the restrictions would remain in place for 10 days. In its notice, the FAA also restricted air space extended in a radius of 10 nautical miles […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43416,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43415"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43415"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43415\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}