There were three NORAD exercises (Sky Shield I, II, and III) in 1960, 1961, and 1962 where all civil aviation across the US and Canada were grounded for several hours (the 1961 one was 12 hours, 1960 was 6 hours and 1962 was 5.5 hours). This was with several months of advance notice. These were exercises to test how effective NORAD would be at engaging Soviet bombers. While they publicly announced that they were 99% effective, in actual fact no more than a quarter of the bombers were even engaged before they reached their target. This evaluation was not declassified until the 1990s.
After 1962 there was too much air travel to continue to shut it down for exercises, and NORAD switched to smaller, regional level things that did not shut down air travel after that. But the results of Sky Shield III in 1962 were the only experience that the FAA had to work from when they did the full ground stop after September 11th. Sky Shield III had tested how quickly air traffic control could clear the sky in the event of a nuclear war- the USAF had put up several hundred T-33 trainers, flying them randomly around the US and Canada, and then at a certain point in the exercise the ATC had to get them all on the ground far away from major metropolitan centers (presumed lost in the war).
My grandmother was using a similar saying long before that, translated approximately: "there's never just 1 mouse in the barn". I'd bet these expressions have been common across the world for centuries (maybe substitute for local rodent).
Warren buffet didn't invent it either it's an old saying. I vaguely recall it from an insecticide commercial when I was a child but they probably didn't invent it either.
Not surprising its use has exploded in recent days..
Which is actually worse than the regulated airlines were before Jimmy Carter deregulated them. When prices were uniformly set by the government, there were 11 "trunk" airlines in 1978, 9 regional airlines, and three unregulated intrastate airlines- one was Southwest (flying just in Texas, the other two, Air California and PSA, were just in California). Those 23 airlines are now down basically to the Big 4 plus 3 little ones (Alaska, Jet Blue, Frontier). Airline tickets were more expensive- well, the prices were about the same number of dollars but thanks to inflation that's a lot less buying power.
I meant just in terms of number of airlines, we are worse off. Oh, and service quality. And comfort in flight. (Ignoring things that changed in the rest of society: in 1978 all flights had smoking sections!)
I specifically mentioned the price as the one metric that has improved. And it's a pretty important metric! But not the only one.
You can still get service, comfort, and quality on modern airlines - you just have to pay the 2026 equivalent of a 1977 coach ticket. And I'll bet today's first class is better than yesteryear's coach.
> I meant just in terms of number of airlines, we are worse off.
Ok, but why do you care how many airlines exist? Competition?
Guess what? There was a larger number of airline CEOs, and... less competition! Airline profit margins were fat back in the day (isn't excessive "producer surplus" supposedly a sign of a non-competitive market?).
Not only did the government set the maximum and minimum price an airline could charge, but all routes had to be approved by the government. Airlines who served a particular route were even allowed to protest when another airline petitioned to offer service on that route, and "too many competitors" was considered a valid reason to deny an application.
The reason we have so many fewer airlines today is that some airlines outcompeted others after airlines were finally allowed to compete for customers. One of the things that nobody likes to talk about w.r.t. competition is "what happens to the competitor who got out-competed?"
The answer is: He exits the market (goes bankrupt or gets merged into another competitor). This happens one-by-one until the number of competitors has been reduced enough to achieve a stable market equilibrium. That equilibrium is achieved when the number of competitors is sufficiently small to give the remaining competitors "pricing power" to maintain reasonable profit margins (and thus not go bankrupt).
> Oh, and service quality. And comfort in flight.
Right, when the government makes it illegal to compete on price, you have to compete on other things.
You can still get that old-school level of service and comfort today. It's called first class, and it's great!
They do all sorts of wonderful things, like offer a glass of bubbly before takeoff, halfway decent food, loads of legroom, wide seats for our fat American butts, a couple free checked bags, and flight attendants who act like they give a damn. Most of that wasn't included in a domestic economy ticket back in the old days.
The best part is that modern domestic first class still only costs about the same as an old-school economy ticket. But it turns out that what almost all customers really want is the cheapest ticket possible. Their revealed preference is that they prefer lower quality, no checked bag, and cheaper prices. Airlines who offered this option survived and those who didn't perished.
Economy Plus or whatever most carriers call it these days (aka domestic first class) is definitely not "first class" in any real comfort sense.
I road it once, and the only real difference is an included hard drink, getting off first (which doesn't matter if you have a checked bag), and more leg room before your knees hit the wall in front of you. Debatable about feet room though, since feet can't slide under the wall...
> Which is actually worse than the regulated airlines were before Jimmy Carter deregulated them
Worse than when the government set, not just the maximum, but also the minimum price an airline could charge for a ticket? You're saying that time, when price competition was literally illegal, was better than today?
Is there any chance that you're not actually old enough to remember that time?
What, pray tell, is the advantage of competition when the competitors are forced by the government to charge the same price for the same route? And not just forced to charge the same price, oh no! But forced to charge a price higher than railroads (which cost more to operate than airlines), so as not to outcompete railroads, which are both slower and more expensive to operate.
I think the evidence is all anecdotal about the end of Congressional earmarks. In 2008-9 Congress banned set-aside earmarks, and no one has brought that back, and there are plenty of experienced legislative people who claim that has hurt the ability to get deals done.
In addition, the fate of the "Cornhusker Kickback" is illustrative. One of the more conservative Democratic senators during the ACA negotiations was Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson. In exchange for his vote he got Nebraska a much better deal than any other state- the Federal Government would pay 100% cost of Medicaid expansion costs, rather than 90% as with every other state. This was a classic case of negotiations and special deal cutting for important votes.
But then the news media got a hold of it, called it the "Cornhusker Kickback" and it became so unpopular that Nelson got it stripped out of the final bill. These sorts of things dying in the attention of the media mean that Nebraska got a worse deal than they could have! But it was so unpopular in Nebraska that Nelson thought it hurt his standing with the state. Which goes to the main point.
Eastern Europe wasn't something that the Americans and British could give away, it was the hard work of the Soviet Army (and many bad choices by Hitler) that ensured that Hungary would be on the Soviet sphere of control. Churchill did agree to the Percentages Agreement (there is no evidence that FDR ever learned about it) at the Moscow Conference in October 1944, but even that was already too late, it was merely an acceptance of something that Stalin already had.
Stalin seems, per _Yalta_ by Plokhy, to have tried to keep Poland and France balanced against each other. In June 1944 de Gaulle set up the GPRF for France, and a few weeks later the PKWN ("Lublin Government") was set up for Poland. Both started out as broad-front governments that combined Communist and Capitalist forces to fight the Nazis, and then over the course until 1945-6, when the Fourth Republic and the TRJN were created after the war ended, more normalized governments were created again combining both elements, and then lasting a few more years until the weaker side in both governments- in both cases the side not allied with the armies that liberated them- were finally fully purged from the Government. That was 1947 for Poland and 1949 for France.
Basically, I think that the absolute best case the Western Allies could have gotten, if this was their most important goal (which it was not for either FDR or WSC), was some sort of Finlandization of all of Europe. But I think it's very unlikely that Stalin would have accepted that- he demanded buffer space for the USSR, he wanted to loot all the factories etc. of Europe to help the USSR rebuild. He wasn't inclined to trust "oh they'll all be neutral in the future." And the only card that FDR and WSC actually had, as far as I can tell, was to start a massive war while World War Two continued in the Pacific. We know that VJ day followed VE day by only a few months, but no one at Yalta expected that, they fully expected Japan to last until 1946 or maybe even 1947. FDR's most important goal at that conference was to get Stalin to fully commit to war against Japan, he's not going to threaten war with the USSR over Eastern Europe. And absent the threat of war, I don't see any negotiation tactic that FDR and WSC could use to free Hungary. Like I said, if Stalin was feeling surprisingly weak, maybe the West could have traded West Germany+Low Countries+France+Italy being fully demilitarized and forcibly neutral for the same in Eastern Europe, but I don't think it was possible to reach that agreement and I think it would have been a bad trade if they could.
After the war, Churchill blamed FDR for selling Eastern Europe out at Yalta because he wanted to hide the "Percentages Agreement"- which again was purely a UK-USSR agreement with no evidence that FDR ever knew about it- after the Cold War started. But the last German defenders of Budapest surrendered only a day or two after the end of the Yalta conference, Soviet domination of Hungary was locked in long before that meeting.
So traditional Venture firms are not part of this (1). VC buys equity in their start-ups, not debt, so interest rates aren't a direct concern of theirs. And VC firms generally do not borrow, they raise investment funds of investors money and because it is high risk, generally speaking no one lends money to these funds.
Private Equity firms on the other hand do generally take on a lot of debt- they have their own money but they borrow even more (2) and use that amount of money to buy out the current owners of a company. Basically they borrow to turn a steady stream of revenue into the future (an existing software company that is profitable) into a big pile of cash today for the current owners. And then they need to pay off that borrowing over time, from the steady stream of revenue that the software company generates. And if they are wrong about the size of the steady stream of revenue, they basically declare bankruptcy and the people who loaned the money (banks but also pension firms etc.) now run the company.
1: The way that VC changes is that the rising interest rates mean that the returns to safe investments are higher, so in order to attract new capital VC firms have to promise even higher returns as well.
2: They borrow money to get higher returns- if you have 5 dollars in a stock and it goes up 20% you have 6 dollars. If you have 5 dollars and borrow 5 dollars and invest it in a stock that goes up 20% you have 7 dollars after you pay back the loan. The catch is, if the stock instead goes down by 20%, after you pay back the loan you only have 3 dollars. (And if the stock goes down 50% you are wiped out.) But PE firms are confident that their investments will always be winners, so they take out loans like that.
For a while (2018-2022) it was hot to buy up software companies that dominated a single niche and jack up prices. The bet was that since software is such a 0-1 business that they would have great moats and have strong pricing power. My father-in-law is blind and used to use JAWS until it got bought up by a private equity firm (Vispero) which tried to dominate the software accessibility market and jacked up the prices to annual subscriptions. He's a electrical engineer so he was comfortable switching to free software NVDA, but a lot of people paid up.
Now with LLM's that business model is in shambles and the finance side of it is less attractive with interest rates so high. I suspect that this is actually driving the software engineer hiring slow-down, because these companies were actually doing most of the employing of software engineers, much more than the big tech companies.
I'm not a SWE, (I'm a data engineer) but this jives with what I saw while looking for work. I'm not a particularly good DE, so I was out there for 18 months. There were still plenty of listings but not many of them were in "tech" companies in the traditional sense. Part of this was leaving a tech hub for what is very much not one, but the biggest issue that I found in landing work was that I was now competing for relatively boring $100k+ jobs with guys who were working $200k+ jobs in 2020 - 2023. The 3 - 6 "tech" orgs that used to employ these folks regionally just aren't really hiring that much.
Yes. I got laid off from Capital One at 3 years of experience in 2025 and I found myself either competing with laid off Amazon employees with 4+ years of experience or applying to junior roles and competing with new grads.
I ended up sidestepping the whole market and now I make $75k NZD, so I'm not sure who won in the end.
The best managers I’ve ever known were some guys who came over to Amazon from Capital One. They were deeply embedded into the EC2 infrastructure systems, including the team I was on — EC2-Chronos. We were responsible for managing all NTP time sync across all of Amazon and AWS, in every single region, availability zone, and datacenter. That includes the isolated and classified regions.
That was also one of the best teams of technical people I’ve ever known.
Sadly, there was also the Amazon and AWS S-Team leadership, who came up with things like RTO and mandatory co-location with your manager. They lost a lot of good people, and I think that was entirely intentional.
As I understand it the situation is much worse than that, the existing debt is floating rate so in some situations can put previously sustainable companies into the red. This of course also affects their ability to refinance so it can spiral from there unless they take drastic measures (which still might not be enough).
> Yeah, it's rarely not fixed, and a lot was tied to the historic expectation of the investment being at most ~5-7 years.
You've got it reversed, the debt BDC's and PC firms write is usually floating rate based off SOFR. That' s why they do so well in rising rate environments.
Now they often borrow at fixed rates by issuing bonds or preferred shares that pay a fixed rate so falling rates has to opposite effect on them.
My understanding is that almost all deals are built on floating rate debt, with some hedging. I don't work in PE though, maybe someone here knows the market in more detail.
I was thinking we should have our own internal saas-pocalypse where I work, or at least threaten one to our vendors.
It used to be that vendors could tie their cost to the value they provide, but now their cost is more correlated to the token spend to reverse engineer and re-implement them (using appropriate clean room controls etc). If their cost goes to far above the AI-driven re-write, they're more likely to get jettisoned (absent some other moat not included purely in the technology).
I'm sure we can all think of products that charge a fair whack in license fees, but would not be massively difficult to re-implement (or at least for the subset of features actually used).
On some level, yes, though when I choose a saas product, what I'm really choosing is not a basket of features, but rather someone else to be worrying about scaling, monitoring, security patches, uptime, etc.
Like in theory your agents can build all that too, but all the ancillary bits benefit a lot from being spread across a pool of users with different time zones, release cycles, whatever.
Exactly, just because you can vibe code an HTML sanitizer or an operation system, doesn't mean that you should..
And its the same reason you'd rather have a SaaS vendor, than asking an agent why the cloud bill keeps climbing and then have to debate the impact of delete such and such VMs or databases that nobody knows what do :)
You also don't ask your agent to start from assembly.
Things you can get upfront as libraries or services are things you and your agent don't have to worry about.
I'm not even sure there is anything new here, just that we have a capability jump with LLMs, you'll probably prefer spending it on building features, not replacing vendors (unless they are crazy expensive).
So I wonder if the more generic SAAS platforms (like Azure, AWS) that can offer scaling, monitoring, security patches, etc. will start to niche or industry specific Saas tools. Since the "basket of features" is not what is really needed.
Many organizations just want to diffuse responsibility away from themselves and will gladly sign a contract to do so. Paying a vendor is infinitely more affordable than the risk of trying to bring a vendors' core competency in-house.
I think the SaaS-pocalypse is going to surface more from new AI-first SaaS companies entering the market and undercutting incumbents in a way that's difficult to compete with.
At the same time we have to value domain experience when it is a cornerstone. Ive worked for "middleman" companies that at face value seem superfluous only to realize we handled relationships or bureaucracies much more effectively then our clients could and thereby provided concrete value well beyond our cost.
Just use a vendor intelligence service to find out what others are paying to cram down what they're trying to charge you. Lots of competitors in this space, you provide them contract details, they provide a report on how and where to push.
2018-2022 was also when interest rates were at historical lows so companies were placing 'big bets' with less-but-not-negligible risks. Same was true for hiring too - remote work + lots of liquidity meant a massive hiring spree that we're now, with our 5x higher interest rates, very much in the comedown for (and which many leaders pin on 'AI-assisted work' and not on their really rash and stupid bets not panning out).
> I suspect that this is actually driving the software engineer hiring slow-down
Are we in a slow-down anymore? Anecdotally I feel things were rough Dec '25 - June '26, but ever since August I've had more interview requests in my inbox than I can remember in my 10+ year career.
I don't think this is true. Twitter is able to support roughly as many users as before on only 20% of the employees, but those users aren't Twitter's customers. Their customers were the advertisers who paid them money to advertise to those users. And the majority of Twitter's staff before the acquisition were working for those customers- either keeping conversations to be the sorts of things advertisers wanted to be associated with or categorizing and data-mining the messages that had been sent to figure out the ads to show users or building a advertising management platform for those customers to use or maintaining relationships with all of the advertisers.
After the acquisition, advertising revenue dramatically dropped (to a low of about 1/3 in 2025 though it has apparently recovered up to only down about 50%!), because all of those functions were gutted. This is why Twitter tried to switch to "buying a blue-check" and other premium features (e.g. access to Grok), because they had fired all of the people necessary to run a real advertising business and they needed revenue.
And I know that you don't need that many employees to support Twitter's customer facing business because Bluesky does basically the same thing (message storage/search backend+web app+two mobile apps) and they worked for over a year on just 20 million in total raises (and no advertising or any other revenue)- they did a Series B in 2025 that raised over 100 million, but they were operational for over a year on just 20 million in raise. So yeah, it doesn't take that many people to just present the messages of users to other users, but what Twitter did was to cut back on what they did for their customers and accept the big drop in revenue that came with it, and that's not really proof of anything.
'“We know the thousands of customers who pre-ordered Anthem have some concerns, but we are confident this collection of words scrawled on a conference room board will be a revolutionary third-person shooter experience when released at the end of the week,” said director Jonathan Warner, who shared a progress update with players by sending out a screenshot of an email chain that ended with an agreement to call the game Anthem.'
"Stop complaining and attacking studios just because a game isn’t everything you want. Developers put too much stock in making games enjoyable and playable as it is. Planning to make something as profitable as Anthem was supposed to be and is a huge undertaking, so at least give them credit for trying. BioWare had 18 months to build a game that would sell millions of copies based on the goodwill they built up, and they hit it out of the park. You may not understand Q4 projections, but they do. Anthem is a game that exists and is funding [EA] CEO bonuses, and by that measure, it’s been a huge success."
For anyone unfamiliar with Anthem (including me, before I read the second Onion article) and curious about what happened, Wikipedia covers some of the executive decisions and leadership changes that hurt the effort:
Iirc it was a stupid C-suite decision to use Frostbyte across EA studios. It never made much technical sense and DICE lacked the bandwidth and capital to support so many teams and usecases.
Yes after the success of frostbite around Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3 or so, EA decided it should be used in everything. Not unlike the mistake Capcom is making with REngine right now, if the performance woes of Monster Hunter Wilds and Dragons Dogma 2 are anything to go by.
Pretty sure there was even a Need for Speed game on Frostbite which was... huh.
I worked on three of them! While there are some serious issues with Frostbite and everyone loves blaming it for everything, its role in sabotaging huge projects is definitely overblown.
There are some issues with workflow and it is true that the UI definitely was, as many at EA said, "by programmers for programmers". But it's a very capable engine in the right hands.
That said, I'd pick Unreal any day for a AAA project and Unity or Unreal for smaller projects.
cool, i think Frostbite is really pretty honestly. performs well in BF but ive not played other games that use it knowingly.
Why would you pick unreal? It seems a lot of games made in it suffer performance issues. In my mind its a really unwieldy engine. (ofc, because its so feature packed, and perhaps because i am no professional engine dev :-))
For a professional project with at least 30+ developers the complexity of using Unreal is necessary and on par with any competent engine. In fact, I feel it is often much easier to do things well in Unreal.
I like Unreal because it's really quite intuitive and ergonomic for larger productions, fairly well documented, and has some of the coolest tech in the industry. Their rendering pipelines are beautiful and a joy to work with and I could rant all day about my love for Nanite and Lumen. It is light years ahead of Unity and much easier to understand and modify than Frostbite.
I will say that Unity has better support out of the box for custom shaders and compute than Unreal (and Frostbite).
Now, you mentioned performance. Funny thing: performance has been my primary professional concern for the last six years of my career. Unreal itself performs very well if you use it correctly and has really good documentation for best practices as well as amazing tools for measuring performance and indicating what is wrong. The tools in Frostbite were very lackluster. Unity has some fairly good stuff. Unreal feels so far ahead.
I believe the reason there are more visible Unreal games with performance issues is because there are a lot more noteworthy ambitious productions in Unreal. That means games which push what they can deliver, and often don't quite get there. And for smaller productions it's likely just a matter of less experienced teams not following the best practices or cranking settings up to 11 without proper performance budgeting.
It’s just a rerun. Bioware had an entire prototype of a game called “Agent”, a james bond style bioware RPG built on EA technology from sports games … until it became clear the technology to render madden NfL lacked something like “non flat surfaces” you’d need to build a world :/
The core issue is wanting to jump on the Fortnite hype train. Every exec wanted their own money printing machine. It's not unique to this studio: abandoning the core IP to pursue an Overwatch clone.
>Internally, the project was codenamed "Dylan" by BioWare, in reference to Bob Dylan in hopes that it would be a name that would be spoken about years later.
The Onion is funny, but not exactly kind here. I would recommend Mark Darrah's post-mortem on Anthem; he's not an unbiased source (he became an executive producer on the project part way through development, and I think he does try to let himself off easy in his retelling of events), but it's pretty clear that mismanagement--both within Bioware and especially from EA--set Anthem down a track that was hard to recover from. Development goals, gameplay design, and even architectural decisions were constantly shifting until late in development, leading devs to constantly rework the game as new requirements came and went.
The game _was_ forced to release in that financial year, but as Darrah eloquently puts it: "There was no point in delaying because that team didn't have another year in them"
former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah revealed that internally at the studio, the shooter had code for local play and private server use until a few months before launch. Presumably, it's still there to be "salvaged and recovered."
"Anthem actually had the code for local servers running in a dev environment right up until a few months up to launch," Darrah commented. "I don't know that they still work but the code is there to be salvaged and recovered."
Mark Darrah suggested releasing a single player only version but presumably this version of EA that has entirely shutdown BioWare altogether has even less reason to release Single Player Only Anthem.
There is maybe some hope archivists will find a production build of Anthem in the wilds of Steam versions with that local server code still accessible in some sort of debug flag and then reverse engineer some of the other live services Anthem depended on.
I mean, most likely it just means they could run servers locally for development, that's pretty standard. I used to work on The Division and every dev could trivially spawn local servers for testing, I basically had it set up so every time I ran the client my own server started in the background. That was "local play" since the architecture of the game is fundamentally centered around all the gameplay systems running on the server. If(or rather - when) their public servers go down, the same statement could be made - that there is code in there for "private" or "local" play. But in reality it's just about running the servers locally, "salvaging" is just having access to the full source code, which is not something Ubisoft would ever do, just like EA wouldn't(I would love to be surprised though!).
Not quite; Darrah says in his video that the direction from EA flip-flopped between client server and peer-to-peer several times during development, so the code they'd be salvaging would be the original peer-to-peer code. But since that code isn't part of the final game and Bioware is going away... I kind of doubt that code exists in a state where it could be re-integrated with the retail release of Anthem.
I loved The Division. Some months ago I re-downloaded it and just ran around for a bit. The setting and world feel are still there and the story is deeper than some single player games. For a while I thought, wouldn't it be amazing if it was ever released (or leaked) so it could be player hosted or modded in a local kind of development like this. But, I didn't stay with that thought. There was just something about that game that had a beginning, middle and end for me. Maybe I'm just getting old.
> There was just something about that game that had a beginning, middle and end for me. Maybe I'm just getting old.
I think you had a very different experience than me. I enjoyed The Division 1 and 2 but the story was completely unmemorable and by the time you get to the end they shift you into end-game Diablo-esque grind-mode, not some definitive ending.
The voice recordings and non-linearity were what made it for me. I felt like I was piecing the world together as I explored. Even after doing the boss fight finding intel that explained something that wasn’t known before slotted it into my understanding of the story. By the time I reached the grind at the end, it was like I had a world in my head and it was ok to close the book.
What’s most disappointing about Anthem was that the game had so much potential. The graphics, flying around like Ironman, sound, etc was incredible. But the world and content felt like you were playing a tech demo. It was like they finished polishing everything technical and were forced to launch before the game to rest on top of it was even started.
No other game has come close to capturing the absolute joy of flying in that game.
I still think that the storyline of the game and that the fact that an AT-AT just shows up in the middle of the storyline like you should know what it is seemed to hint the game might have at one point been intended to be a "Mandalorian simulator" (the central macguffins also had a very "Lost Mandalore" from Clone Wars and Rebels cartoons/"KOTOR" feel; the central quest hub pub was very Star Wars cantina-ish; etc). I don't think we'll ever get the full story on what happened, but it seemed like the game came out in a period where EA was worried they had lost the Star Wars license forever and might have panicked and over-corrected from a licensed game with a lot of excitement behind its storyline to an "original" property without the right writers to file the serial numbers off very well and without enough passion for whatever they were trying to make original about it. Whereas if they waited just a couple years they would have a shared Star Wars license again and the hype train of Disney+'s Mandalorian show, and a "Mandalorian simulator" might have been very well timed to be what "everyone" wanted.
One problem with live service games is management will be tempted to release it as a minimum viable product and add all the features that would make it competitive in later updates. That's all well and good if players are hooked enough to stay, but if they don't there will never be enough money to finish the game.
Seems like that description fits a whole lot of modern (read: everything from the past decade) games. And some of those even enjoy success and are beloved by many players for some reason, like Breath of the Wild.
20 years ago some friends and I were walking by 33 Thomas St and discussed how that must be the building that they imprison Magneto in. Weird looking building.
After 1962 there was too much air travel to continue to shut it down for exercises, and NORAD switched to smaller, regional level things that did not shut down air travel after that. But the results of Sky Shield III in 1962 were the only experience that the FAA had to work from when they did the full ground stop after September 11th. Sky Shield III had tested how quickly air traffic control could clear the sky in the event of a nuclear war- the USAF had put up several hundred T-33 trainers, flying them randomly around the US and Canada, and then at a certain point in the exercise the ATC had to get them all on the ground far away from major metropolitan centers (presumed lost in the war).
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