‘It could be Selma Blair’: Bill Maher jokes about her flight arrest after FAA outage

After a communications outage halted most flight departures for more than four hours across the United States, operations resumed shortly after. While the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) blamed the disturbance on "extraordinary circumstances and reasons for safety," comedian Bill Maher took to his show Real Time to joke about a possible reason for the disruption. Referring to actress Selma Blair, Maher said, "It could be Selma Blair, we just don't know."

This was not the first time Maher had connected Selma Blair's name to unusual events. A month prior, Blair was arrested at New York's John F Kennedy International Airport after allegedly attempting to open the emergency exit door of a Delta Air Lines flight while it was airborne. The incident, which involved assaulting two flight attendants, led to her detention and subsequent hospitalization. Blair later apologized for her actions, stating she had no intention of causing harm.

The FAA ground stop on November 13, 2022, affected over 10,000 flights, with some being diverted and thousands of passengers stranded at airports nationwide. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy attributed the outage to outdated network infrastructure, citing old switches, routers, and copper lines that had been overwhelmed with data, causing instability in radar information and communications with aircraft.