Obviously the airports in New York were going to be closed, O’Reilly concluded. But even he was surprised when he received a call from the air-traffic control center in Boston alerting him that all airspace in the United States had been closed. The second piece of news from Boston: all American carriers—United, American, Delta, Continental—had to land at the nearest airport immediately. Foreign carriers had a choice: they could turn around and fly home or land in Canada, but they couldn’t come into the United States. As O’Reilly talked to Federal Aviation Administration officials in Boston,
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