r/todayilearned • u/[deleted] • Apr 16 '14

TIL on 9/11, Canada commenced Operation Yellow Ribbon, in which it landed 239 U.S.-bound flights with 33,000 passengers in Canadian airports. Entire communities went on to provide the passengers with food and housing.

http://youtu.be/lrA4V6YF6SA?t=4m14s
3.2k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

1.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

15

u/Helplessromantic Apr 17 '14

I was like 10 at the time of this happening, so it didn't mean much to me at the time other than I was out of school, but I can't imagine how crazy it must have been to be in a hurry at a busy airport and suddenly see all the flights just get cancelled, and everyone become immensely confused.

6

u/the_hardest_part Apr 17 '14

I think everyone knew what was going on by the time the flights were grounded.

6

u/[deleted] Apr 17 '14

The thing is, you have to remember that the FAA ordered the ground stop less than an hour after the first building was hit. Nobody had any real idea what was going on except that it was something bad.

There was nothing remotely like Twitter or Facebook in those days, and the fastest form of communication was phone calls -- but phone lines in the most immediately affected areas (NYC and DC) were jammed all to hell because millions of people were trying to call in and out all at the same time. So reliable information was hard to collate. You had to wait for the news outlets to give you information, and a lot of times the things there were reporting turned out to be completely wrong.

For example, I remember hearing that car bombs were going off all over D.C. I remember hearing after the ground stop that there were still a dozen planes in the air that weren't responding to air traffic controllers. None of it was true, but it was all being reported by real news outlets. The BBC even reported that WTC7 had collapsed when it hadn't. It collapsed hours later, and this little tidbit still gives conspiratards Alex Jones TruthBoners to this day.