Dreux Air Base came within the Paris Air Traffic Control Area, as did the busy Le Bourget and Orly Airports, and an extra squadron of jet aircraft had not been accounted for in the French air traffic controllers' staffing levels. The safety of civilian air traffic was used to justify denying the Americans permission to fly out of Dreux. Notwithstanding stormy protests by the United States, the RF-84s stayed on the ground. The pilots who had only just completed a risky Atlantic crossing of several thousand kilometers, had to wait in the operations room. In the United States, the Birmingham News daily newspaper reported that 'their boys', after the sudden mobilization and the weeks of preparation, had not been sent to Europe to sit around a French airfield doing nothing.