Now, A6reoMexican, having exhausted its own local resources, had appealed to 'IVA for help. Air Traffic Control, hampered by the loss of runway 3 three zero, had instituted flow control procedures, limiting the volume of incoming traffic from adjoining air route centers at Minrieapolis, Cleveland , Kansas City, Indianapolis , and Denver . Despite this, twenty incoming flights were stacked up overhead, and orbiting, some nearing low fuel limits. On the ground, twice that number were readying for takeoff. But until the backlog of flights in the air could be reduced, ATC had ordered further delays of outbound traffic. Meanwhile, terminal gates, taxiways, and ground holding areas were increasingly crammed with waiting aircraft, many with engines running. Air freiQht warehouses-of all airlines-were stacked to their palletized limits with shipments, their usual high speed transit impeded by the storm. Freight supervisors were nervously watching perishables-hothouse flowers from Wyoming for New England; a ton of Pennsylvania cheese for Anchorage , Alaska ; frozen peas for Iceland ; live lobsters-trans-shipped from the east for a polar route flight-destination Europe . The lobsters were for tomorrow's menus in Edinburgh and Paris where they would be billed as "fresh local seafood," and American tourists would order them unknowingly. Storm or not, contracts decreed that air freight perishables must arrive at destination fresh, and swiftly. Causing special anxiety in American Airlines Freight was a shipment of several thousand turkey poults, hatched in incubators only hours earlier. The precise hatching-shipping schedule-like a complex order of battle-was set up weeks ago, before the turkey eggs were laid. It called for delivery of the live birds on the West Coast within forty-eight hours of birth, the limit of the tiny creatures' existence without their first food or water. Normally, the arrangement provided a near-hundred percent survival. Significant also-if the poults were fed en route, they would stink, and so would the airplane conveying them, for days afterward. Already the poults' schedule was out of joint by several hours. But an airplane had been diverted from passenger to freight service, and tonight the fledgling turkeys would have priority over everything else traveling, human VIPs included.