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  • 2004-03-31 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Saudis Fly Out of the U.S. While Airspace Was Still Closed after 9/11? (en)
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  • In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks on America, the Federal Aviation Administration immediately ordered all flights in the United States grounded, and that ban stayed in effect until September 13. (Even then, for that first day commercial carriers were mostly either completing the interrupted flights of September 11 or repositioning empty aircraft in anticipation of the resumption of full service. New passenger flights did not generally resume until the 14th.) During that two-day period of full lock-down, only the military and specially FAA-authorized flights that delivered life-saving medical necessities were in the air. The enforcement of the empty skies directive was so stringent that even after the United Network for Organ Sharing sought and gained FAA clearance to use charter aircraft on September 12 to effect time-critical deliveries of organs for transplant, one of its flights carrying a human heart was forced to the ground in Bellingham, Washington, 80 miles short of its Seattle destination, by two Navy F/A-18 fighters. (The organ completed its journey after being transferred to a helicopter.) The claim that bin Laden family members (and other Saudis) were allowed to secretly fly out of the U.S. and back to Saudi Arabia while a government-imposed ban on air travel was in effect, all without any intervention by the FBI, has since been negated by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also known as the 9/11 Commission). In their final report, the commission noted: The 9/11 Commission also expanded on the following points in footnotes to the section of the report quoted above: (en)
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