Hello and welcome to episode 357 of AvTalk.

I am Jim Petchnik, here as Sometimes with...

Ned Russell.

Ned, thanks so much for joining the show once again, stepping in on behalf of Jason,

who's actually going to be joining us later in the show with our good friend, Jeremy Dwyer

Lindgren.

They are in St. Martin this week, and the tone of my voice certainly tells you that I'm thrilled for them and not at all jealous.

No, not at all jealous as we are freezing here in Washington and Chicago.

It actually got above freezing today over the past couple days. So that's nice. It's mud season now.

Lovely. Well, our snow crete is slowly melting.

Yeah, there you go. They escaped to St. Martin, and they've been up to absolutely nothing whatsoever

except a few of the flights that I absolutely wish I could have been along for.

But we'll talk with them a little bit later in the show and hear about their adventures in the Caribbean.

But we'll turn now to El Paso, Texas, where who knows what happened this morning, for roughly eight hours

on the morning of Wednesday, February 11th, today as we record, the FAA closed airspace

between the surface and 18,000 feet around El Paso to all traffic, not all passenger

traffic, not all general aviation traffic, not all cargo traffic, all traffic, including

military traffic, medical evacuation flights, everything.

They said, you can't fly there. Ian, can I just say this is crazy. I saw Pete Montian from CNN

was saying, I mean, even during 9-11, medevacs and stuff were allowed to fly. Like, this is an

entire closure, which is really

unprecedented. Yeah. And what's even more bizarre is that the closure was scheduled to last for

...