(The Epoch Times)—The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a warning on Thursday about potential disruptions in air travel surrounding the upcoming total solar eclipse on April 8.
The celestial event, set to cast a path of totality across 13 states, is anticipated to impact air travel operations before, during, and after the eclipse, according to the aviation agency.
The FAA indicated that the eclipse’s effects on U.S. airspace are anticipated between approximately 2:30 p.m. and 3:40 p.m. ET. At this time, some 32 million people in North America are expected to witness the rare event, which is anticipated to be the most-watched solar eclipse in history.
A total solar eclipse occurs when the new moon passes directly in front of the sun, completely blocking out sunlight and casting the moon’s shadow on the surface of Earth. The most recent total solar eclipse to happen on American soil was the Great American Eclipse in 2017.
A notice issued by the FAA to airmen emphasized potential impacts on air traffic and airports along the eclipse path from April 7 to April 10. Pilots and aviation personnel are advised to stay informed and prepared for possible disruptions.
In a statement, the FAA suggested that aircraft should ready themselves for potential airborne holding, reroutes, and departure clearance times that might be issued for all domestic IFR arrivals and departures during the eclipse.
Departing aircraft from airports along the eclipse path are “strongly encouraged” to coordinate their departure times as early as possible to assist fixed base operators with staging aircraft and alleviating ramp congestion.
“There may be a higher traffic volume than normal anticipated at airports along the path of the eclipse. Traffic should anticipate delays during peak traffic periods,” the FAA stated.
The agency cautioned that parking may be limited, particularly at small, uncontrolled airports. Delays with issuing IFR departure clearances might also happen.
“VFR departures may also expect delays for airborne pickup of IFR clearance within 50 NM either side of the path of the eclipse,” the FAA stated.
The eclipse will also impact or possibly prohibit aircraft from conducting practice approaches, touch-and-go operations, flight following services, and pilot training at airports during the event.
“Airmen should check NOTAMs carefully for special procedures/restrictions that may be in place at affected airports. Specific NOTAM procedures may be revised, and arrivals to some airports possibly restricted so please review NOTAMs frequently to verify you have the current information,” the agency advised.
‘Great North American Eclipse’
Dubbed the “Great North American Eclipse,” the celestial event is expected to be more impressive than the one in 2017, lasting longer, being wider, and traversing more highly populated parts of North America.
On April 8, it will begin over the South Pacific Ocean and move across North America, spanning across Mexico, the United States, and Canada. The 2024 event will move in a different direction than the 2017 event, marking a cross on the United States.
The moon’s shadow will create a relatively narrow ribbon—the path of totality—of about 100 miles over Earth’s surface. To experience a 100 percent total solar eclipse, viewers should be located in this narrow band. This will reveal “the star’s outer atmosphere, called the corona,” according to NASA.
Totality will last for longer than four minutes in some parts of the United States.
According to NASA, the path of the eclipse will traverse Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Small parts of Tennessee and Michigan will also experience the total solar eclipse.
The eclipse will enter Canada in southern Ontario, journey through Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Cape Breton before exiting continental North America on the Atlantic coast of Newfoundland at 5:16 p.m. NDT, according to NASA.
Special security provisions may be enforced for this event, the FAA said, including temporary flight restrictions, two-way radio communications, and discrete transponder requirements.
“Specific NOTAM procedures may be revised, and arrivals to some airports possibly restricted so please review NOTAMs frequently to verify you have the current information,” the FAA reiterated.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
This comment does involve aviation, just slightly off topic: the vanished MH370, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370!
The tenth year anniversary of its mysterious disappearance — awhile back NETFLIX relleased a documentary on it, minus any and all experts; was hoping for at least an Avionics Expert, or Satellite Technology Expert or an IT Expert — no dice!!!
Just three wackadoodles, although two of them did make several decent points, none were expert! A young “Aviation Analyst” — he has a single–engine pilots licence but made extravagantly INCORRECT and ERRONEOUS statements, was the absolute worst of the three!
A silly Swedish pilot on his site, Mentour Pilot, featured a recent documentary, making a big deal of not blaming anyone but inferred at least three times that Capt. Shah may have been the cause —— absolute NONSENSE! (Ooooohhh, a slight change in tonal quality in the final ATC check–in —- whoopee doo but simpleton in critique!)
Capt. Shah and First Officer Hamid were victims like everyone else onboard!
OBVIOUSLY, this Mentour fellow was either a complete dunderheaded Svensk clown, or NEVER bothered to read the FINAL OFFICIAL Malaysia Airlines report, compiled by a board of international aviation people?!
It was blatantly obvious from the report this flight was hacked into, either via solely the SATCOM/SDU systems, or a combination of ground/airborne hacking — anyone who was with a ground crew, back then, could easily have inserted a USB with preloaded program into the SDU port, later perhaps allowing aiborne access?!
The final report showed how the aircraft’s data channels were captured, released, captured, released, etc., corresponded to the INMARSAT satellite movements —— either it was hacked THROUGH or BY the Inmarsat Corporation?!
Given the operations center setup — and this is pure supposition on my part, admittedly — I would be flabbergasted if the sat techs were unaware of any realtime hacking in flight as they poured through reams of data over and over where such anomalies would be readily apparent?! My supposition is that entities within INMARSAT hacked into it, taking control sporadically!?
The correlation between data channels capture and control and satellite movement is of prime importance — in plain sight but either ignored or too subtle for the technically slow–witted?!
Another factor, which appears to have been erased off the Web, was the statically faint MAYDAY call heard at multiple points at the same timeframe: by Thai ATCC, and an aircraft on the deck in New Zealand, getting ready for takeoff or having just arrived on the ground (have since forgotten, exactly)! There was also a very faint pickup by Viet ATCC, but far too faint to make any remote identification!
On that MAYDAY two male voices were heard (Capt. Shah and Mr. Hamid would be my guess) with one shouting their flight cabin or cockpit “was disintegrating” — with a banging sound in the background?! (When I amped up the sound 200X, overladen with heavy static then, it sure sounded like DISCHARGING CAPACITORS in the background — a hardware hacking possibility and surely would act to disintegrate the control panels – few would be familiar with that rare sound and I only knew of it due to a unique experience in my IT background!
My other supposition was that 10 years ago in March of 2014, those Freescale Semiconductor fabrication engineers and administrative personnel onboard may have been evidentiary in its disappearance — they had just finished a special project for the Wuhan University of Technology/Nanotechnology Key Lab, some sort of nano processing system (Harvard’s Charles Lieber was there at the time, most likely at work on his master control program for the already completed syringe–injectable NANOWIRES?)!
The best and MOST OBVIOUS investigation strategy would be to officially match the movements of the INMARSAT satellites with the data channels captures and also inquire of former INMARSAT employees as to the activities during and after the disappearance of MH370 —- those 239 souls onboard deserve at least that!
[SIDEBAR: A month or so after the vanishing of MH370, a most peculiar article appeared in the SCMP, then still a venerable newspaper before Jack Ma purchased it (South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong–based news daily)! This article detailed how a most bizarre malware had been hacked and inserted into various Asian news agencies’ systems —— each time a story on MH370 appeared, false facts and data were inserted into the files and articles — most suspicious if accurate?! The IP origin of the hacking placed it somewhere in China?!]
SORRY!! Failed to mention in the SIDEBAR that the hacking into the Asian news agencies occurred several weeks BEFORE Malaysia Airlines MH370 went missing!