At Boston's Logan Airport, many incoming flyers still hadn't heard what happened to the Malaysia Airlines flight, only to find out upon arrival.
Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 originated in Amsterdam and was found for Kuala Lumpur before being shot out of the sky over eastern Ukraine.
For one passenger, Ben Schlappig, a travel blogger and frequent flyer, news of what happened hit extremely hard. He was flying from Amsterdam to Chicago and saw the passengers checking in for the Malaysia flight.
At the immigration counter, he spoke with one of the passengers, a Dutch man, who boarded the plane to Malaysia.
"We both had a lot of travel tags on our bags, so we were both frequent flyers. We were just talking about flying, nothing out of the ordinary really. He was Dutch, we were talking about where we were going," Schlappig said.
Heartbreak has now set in.
"This definitely hits closer to home. Basically, being one of the last people that communicated with someone on that flight, it's terrifying," he said.
Passengers who arrived from Dubai to Logan Thursday on Emirates say they had no idea their flight took a different path outside of the zone where MH 17 went down.
Lopa Shah, an Emirates passenger, said, "It's actually surprising, they should have at least informed us as to what has happened."
Shah added she did not know that her flight's path was diverted over the region.
"We didn't get any updates on the flight, probably to keep everyone calm," said another passenger Olivia Cristaldi.
U.S. carriers have agreed to not fly over Crimea, even though they rarely do.
Earlier Thursday, a Flight Radar 24 map showed how commercial airliners from all over were diverting away from the airspace over eastern Ukraine.
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