The area controlled by the Fort Bliss training area, McGregor Range Complex and White Sands Missile Range is vast and basically contiguous from El Paso north through New Mexico. The area around the El Paso airport is a drop in the bucket compared to that.
That doesn’t explain what it was only that it was done badly.
And that’s what I don’t get. If you want to test something, White Sands is an hour-ish north of Bliss if you take I-25 and US-70. Hell, shutting down US-70 between Las Cruces and Alamogordo would be just another Wednesday for the people in the area. If it’s small enough, sure, you can keep it on Bliss.
My first thought was that the FAA is corrupt as the rest of the government these days. But if they were smacking DOD with the biggest hammer they’ve got to make a point, then obviously I have to think better of them.
Oh, I know there are still questions about what exactly they fucked up, but I still maintain it was a fuckup.
Maybe they submitted a test or operations plan that didn’t adequately explain the various flight envelopes in the area around the airport. I dunno, there are lots of ways to screw things up if you have lackeys doing the job instead of trained pros.
I wouldn’t be shocked if there was an ongoing pattern of inadequate notification from DOD to FAA in the area and somebody at FAA wanted to make a point.
Like the old Tsarist regime: “Despotism moderated by incompetence”.
There’s nothing here that can’t be explained by incompetent political lap dogs in a pissing contest making decisions that used to be left up to seasoned career federal employees.
According to the AP:
A Trump administration official told The Associated Press that the airspace over El Paso was closed after Mexican cartel drones breached the airspace, but that the Defense Department took action to disable the drones.
The official did not say how many drones were involved or what specifically was done to disable them.
I’m not saying I believe this official, just reporting what they are saying - anonymously and unofficially - at the moment.
It looks like someone with sufficient incompetence and power was responsible. I don’t think everyone left in the government is incompetent. There are some left that know how to do their jobs. However, it took 10 hours of someone saying “hey guys this isn’t a good idea” for them to take it back.
So “blame Mexico” is still the operative plan, I guess…
Who knows, maybe it’s even true.
It makes sense to put up restrictions until further notice when something’s happening. It makes no sense to say for the next 10 days.
How long before (Defense Secretary) Pete Hegseth and (Transportation Secretary) Sean Duffy get in front of the cameras to say that a grave national security threat was averted so quickly by this administration that virtually no flights were delayed at all?
Right — they do “until further notice” somewhere regularly. A specific time duration usually implies something planned e.g. 24 hours around SJU while the Venezuela/Maduro operation went on.
Sounds like they’re at this point just reaching for an explanation that sounds plausible, even if it makes them look stupid, rather than own up to what really went wrong, if they even know what.
NYT gift link:
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/02/11/us/faa-el-paso-flights-airport?unlocked_article_code=1.LVA.cLFT.obLVl9R_vdCf&smid=url-share
I buy the last word in that explanation. The first two are pure CYA for overreacting.
Thanks for the NYT gift link. It sounds like the DoD wanted to use some new anti-drone tech to defend a civilian airport and the Transportation Dept. got (justifiably) nervous.
I think Trump ordered a search for a fugitive when he heard that a wild young cowboy had been shot at Rosa’s Cantina.
And I’ve got such a long* way to go (Such a long way to go**)
To make it to the border of Mexico
So I’ll ride like the wind
Ride like the wind
*from the west Texas town of El Paso? short. Very short. Should have gone to Old Mexico, not the badlands of New Mexico
**as sung by Mr Yacht Rock himself, Michael McDonald
I think it was done to test the waters, to see if anyone in authority would actually step up to say “Uhhh…no!”…and it worked. The government now knows that it can be done at the drop of a hat, and I am predicting that it will happen again.
Latest story is it was a matter of Army and FAA not talking to each other with the folks at Fort Bliss doing stuff that could be trouble for civilian flights. So we’re in a you-know-what measuring contest of who has to clear things with whom?
Great story, hard to question and nobody was named or blamed.