2: Formed in 1972, the Southern Air Defense System, or SADS, was a line of ADC and FAA radar stations stretching along the U.S. Gulf Coast and Southwest states, starting in Alabama and extending across southern Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. The SADS was created following an incident where a commercial airliner flew into New Orleans from Cuba undetected. The passengers were coming to New Orleans to attend a sugarcane convention in 1972. The Air Force had closed most of its southern-tier radar stations several years before for cost-cutting measures, and this vulnerability in the U.S. air-defense system immediately got the attention of America’s military and government leaders. ADC quickly re-established radar coverage across the southern tier by re-opening two former blue-suit AF Stations, namely Dauphin Island AFS, AL, and Lake Charles AFS, LA, and by establishing data-ties to other FAA radar sites, namely Slidell, LA; Ellington AFB, TX; Lackland AFB, TX; Odessa/Andrews, TX; El Paso, TX; Silver City, NM; and Humboldt Mountain (Phoenix), AZ. [Note that Ellington AFB, TX, Lackland AFB, TX, were originally blue-suit radar stations that had been transferred to the FAA after closing.] All these SADS sites comprised operating locations of the newly re-formed 630th Radar Squadron that was then headquartered at the Houston Air-Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC) where radar operations were also located.