I personally remember thinking the planes would be hard to control, like I never pictured just… oops, suddenly these wings don’t work with the laws of nature, straight down to the ground. I was a child when it all went down, so, I don’t remember if it was people actually saying it would happen, just over exaggerating, or what. Since some take things literally though, it should not have been put that way, I could definitely see it being fear mongering, and that’s not good.
There were things that could have been affected though, so one part being put wrong on purpose or not doesn’t mean, we should have ignored it.
There was a lot of fear mongering. Y2K is actually when I realized that I can’t believe everything on the news. They kept reporting on it as an imminent threat for long after it was known that the engineers had patched the issue, and chances of problems were very low. As far as the planes go, the big threat was from air traffic control shutting down, and having thousands of planes in the air with no way to track all of them and safely route them in for landings. Plus there were concerns about navigation. So there were definitely issue, just not fall out of the sky issues.