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On an otherwise ordinary Wednesday in January, the skies above the United States became eerily quiet. Between 7:15 and 9:07 a.m on January 11th, planes stopped taking off from most US runways after a major computer outage prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to issue its first nationwide ground stop since Sept. 11, 2001.

Flying in an airplane is incredibly safe despite what our anxieties and fears might tell us. According to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), aviation has become the first ultra-safe transportation system in history. That means that for every ten million cycles (one cycle involves both a takeoff and landing), there is less than one catastrophic failure.

Dan Bubb, a former pilot from Las Vegas, Nevada, told Newsweek that most holidaymakers wouldn't realise that a fellow passenger had passed away. He said: "If a passenger dies, they will be discreetly removed from the plane, and to avoid upsetting other passengers, the flight crew will not inform the passengers that a [fellow] passenger has died."

Ever wonder where pilots sleep on planes, why people clap upon landing, and what happens when a passenger dies mid-flight?

The Federal Aviation Administration suffered a major system outage this week that grounded planes from coast to coast. More than 10,000 flights were delayed, and 1,000 were canceled after the FAA stopped all domestic departures nationwide. The system was down for almost 90 minutes—it resumed operations at 9 a.m. E.T. yesterday—but the damage was done: the ripple effect continued through the day.

The bad news for Southwest Airlines is that the company’s meltdown this week because of severe winter storms is not its first crisis. Earlier corporate emergencies included its cancelation of more than 1,800 flights over one weekend in 2021; a passenger who died after being partially sucked out of a window at 30,000 feet when an engine ruptured in 2018; and a technology failure that rendered the company’s computer system inoperable for several hours in 2016.

This summer, as I sat on the tarmac at Boston Logan International Airport (BOS) and prepared to take off on JetBlue’s inaugural flight from New England to London, the pilot came over the intercom with news of a brief delay; but it was good news.

When booking a flight to New York City, many travelers fly out of one of the Big Apple’s three major airports: John F. Kennedy International, LaGuardia International, and Newark International airports. But on October 3, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) removed Newark Airport’s NYC city code, meaning it is no longer considered one of New York’s local airports. This change will have an impact on travel for EWR flyers.