00:00TV6 News spoke with Works and Transport Minister Rohan Sinhan via telephone on Friday to receive
00:05an update regarding a Caribbean Airlines flight bound for a destination in the United States
00:11which returned to the Piaco International Airport due to what Minister Sinhan had originally
00:16said was an incident in the Florida airspace on Thursday.
00:20So yesterday after the incident in Florida, in the Florida airspace, the Florida airspace
00:26would have had to be shut down until it was clear and safe for aircrafts to enter or leave
00:35that airspace.
00:36We in Trinidad, we had a couple of flights that would have been affected.
00:40One flight in particular, a car flight, had to actually turn around and they were not
00:46allowed to enter the airspace.
00:49That flight came back in safely, it recruited and then went back out.
00:55Someone on the social media platform X posted on Thursday about being a passenger on a car
01:00flight to New York and was halfway there already only for them to have to turn around and then
01:06referenced the explosion of a rocket earlier in the day.
01:10The Associated Press has reported an unmanned SpaceX Starship rocket broke up in space minutes
01:16after launching from Texas on Thursday, forcing airline flights over the Gulf of Mexico to
01:21alter course to avoid falling debris and setting back Elon Musk's flagship rocket program.
01:51Caribbean Airlines issued an advisory stating that due to airspace closures on the evening
02:06of Thursday, January 16th, three of its flights had been delayed but its other services and
02:11operations continue as per their regular schedule.
02:15Once the airspace was open in Florida, everything went back to normal.
02:19That took a couple of hours and all flights were either rerouted or rescheduled and this
02:27morning everything is back to normal.
02:30Whenever there is a challenge in the airspace, that area would definitely be closed off.
02:36The Works and Transport Minister then spoke about the airspace under the control of the
02:40Trinidad and Tobago Civil Aviation Authority.
02:43So at our civil aviation department here in Trinidad, we control the airspace for about
02:50750,000 square miles, which is one of the largest single areas around the world.
02:56A lot of people will not know that.
02:58We control from Puerto Rico all the way up to close to the African continent where the
03:05airspace is controlled from right here at Piaco.
03:09Minister Sinanan told TV6 News that Trinidad and Tobago's airspace was not affected by
03:14the explosion of the SpaceX rocket in Florida's airspace.
03:18Jule Brown, TV6 News.
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