El Paso Airport Shut Down By The FAA For Special Security Reason

The FAA shut down the EL Paso Airport starting 11:30PM local time, Tuesday night and it will remain closed until 11:30PM Feb 20th.

This was abrupt. Local and State civilian and military authoring received no prior notification.

This affects 1,000 flights, nearly half served by Southwest Airlines.

I did a search on when the last time a US airport was shut down for special security reasons, and it turned up no results. Flights are diverted at times, for a short period of time, when someone like the President or Vice President is landing or taking off, but this is highly unusual.

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Carla · 61-69, F

Do you reckon the military is planning something for that area?

Northwest · M

@Carla A couple of things U can think of:

1. Adding infrastructure to make it a staging station for deportation flights.

2. Trump needs some facilities to allow work on the Qatari plane they gifted him. Usually that work is done in San Antonio, but this is something they had not been planning on,

Carla · 61-69, F

@Northwest is ten days long enough for that work on his flying palace?
And why would they close down for that work?
And the staging thing...
They do work at airports all the time.
Keeping it out of the public eye would be only temporary.

Northwest · M

@Carla

is ten days long enough for that work on his flying palace?

That's a 12-18 months contract, that's being mostly done in the military portion of the San Antonio airport. I figured they might be related because his flying palace "disruption" was unplanned, so they may have needed some minor stuff done in El Paso.

Keeping it out of the public eye would be only temporary.

Yes. The thing can also be related to a military operation that will last for less than 10 days.