Empty skies after 9/11 set the stage for an unlikely climate change experiment.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, officials at the U.S. national air control centre couldn’t make out what was happening, at first.
As controllers watched the second plane crash into the World Trade Center complex just after 9 a.m., however, it became clear that the first one hadn’t been a spectacular accident, but something much more sinister. Planes were becoming fuel-filled missiles. How many? Nobody knew.
Officials at the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration did the only thing they could think of to try to control the situation: ordering every aircraft in U.S. airspace, about 4,000 of them, to land somewhere, anywhere, immediately.
Canadian officials followed. Airports in Atlantic Canada quickly filled with thousands of bewildered people who had been flying west across the Atlantic from Europe, but found themselves stranded in Goose Bay, Labrador or Stephenville, Nfld.
Within a few hours, the skies across the continent were empty except for military aircraft. Here’s what it looked like:
