A dispute between incompetent DUI hire "Whiskey Pete" Hegseth's DOD and incompetent "Real World" resident playboy Sean Duffy's FAA has led to a predictable clown show that had serious consequences for medical emergency response:
Medical emergency evacuation flights heading to El Paso, Texas, were forced to divert to New Mexico on Wednesday after the Federal Aviation Administration shut down all flights in and out of El Paso for 10 days. The order was rescinded after a few hours, but the excuse—Mexican cartel drones breaching the U.S.-Mexico border—doesn’t make any sense, given the fact that drug-smuggling drones do that on a daily basis.
A new report from CBS News suggests that infighting between the FAA and DOD is behind the chaos and confusion around the El Paso airspace. Earlier this week, DOD deployed anti-drone technology to shoot down what were believed to be foreign drones at the border. But at least one of the objects shot down was just a party balloon, according to CBS News. CNN has since reported that it was four mylar balloons.
El Paso Mayor Renard Johnson held a press conference on Wednesday morning to discuss the major disruptions in the city and emphasized the historic nature of DOD’s decision to shut down airspace over a major U.S. city without any notice.
“Medical evacuation flights were forced to divert to Las Cruces. All aviation operations were grounded, including emergency flights. This was a major and unnecessary disruption, one that has not occurred since 9/11,” said Johnson.
The mayor was asked how many emergency flights needed to be diverted, and he replied that he had been on a call with hospital operators this morning but didn’t have an exact number. “But I can tell you that there was a lot of surgical equipment that was coming in from Dallas and other parts of the country to do surgeries here in our community,” said Johnson. “That type of equipment did not show up here in El Paso.”
The initial notice to shut down airspace over El Paso was both last-minute and extremely broad, covering every type of aircraft, including cargo, passenger, and military flights. The order was lifted after a few hours, and the reasons given by President Donald Trump’s officials didn’t make much sense to aviation experts. [snip]
CBS News reports that Wednesday’s disruption in El Paso stemmed from a disagreement between the Pentagon and the FAA over closing airspace for the tests of anti-drone tech, which reportedly included lasers. The U.S. military first shot down a drone with laser technology in 1973, but it wasn’t until the 21st century that lasers became more common in such applications. The Department of Defense’s research and engineering arm tweeted an image of an eagle and lasers shooting down hobby drones on Wednesday... (our emphasis)
They. Were. Escaped. Party. Balloons.
Maybe they should have involved heroic Border Patrol or ICE, who could have easily murdered the unarmed, worst-of-the-worst balloons attempting to infiltrate America.
(Image: Goofus and Doofus / Getty Images)
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