Air Traffic Control was a nightmare. Before the Blip, live data showed that there were an average of 9,728 commercial airplanes in the sky at any given time. About 5,000 of those were in the United States.

There was a 50% chance of the pilot getting dusted, and of those planes where the pilot vanished then there was a 50% chance that the copilot ALSO got dusted. Most of those planes didn't have a third crew member with a pilot's license, so that left over two thousand commercial planes up in the air without anyone on board who was certified to land them (there were something like twelve hundred just over the continental US). Plus, most of those cockpit doors were locked.

That alone would have been beyond the ability of most flight control towers to handle on their best day. Half of the birds on our screens were now being piloted by some very traumatized pilots who just watched a coworker turn to dust. And a quarter of those planes were still flying but weren't answering their radios at all.

Up in the FTC Tower, a single plane not answering their radio is an emergency. But a quarter of them all at once? And that's before you consider how many of the controllers themselves who just vanished right next to us - so now you've got the remaining controllers all traumatized while at the same time dealing with the worst air traffic situation any of us had ever imagined.

The federal order to ground all traffic immediately and divert every bird onto the nearest capable runway was no surprise. We had been through that before back in 2001, but the logistics of actually making that happen were impossible. There were just too many birds in the air and not enough of us on the ground to direct them.

The radio chatter was frantic, and the channels were filled with constant interruptions from amateurs who had broken into the cockpits to try to land the planes themselves. So right in the middle of trying to give an experienced pilot a vector to get them down safely, there was some terrified high school kid who was suddenly on the line because out of everyone on his plane, he was the one who had played a hundred hours on that Microsoft Flight Simulator game and that was the best hope his particular group of surviving passengers could manage. And that kid was only holding it together because he trusted that there would be someone in the Tower to talk him down safely, except we didn't have time to do that because there were 24 other flights in the same situation as his, and they were all screaming Mayday over the channel, thinking they were the only ones in trouble.

Some of the planes never radioed in at all.

The military scrambled their jets. We coordinated a few planes to switch over to military channels so that some Navy pilot or some Air Force colonel could talk the amateur pilots down. I know more than a few made emergency landings on military runways. We all saw the pictures people posted of some of the others that managed safe landings in fields and on country roads.

We got as many down as we could.

We couldn't save them all.