The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland (3 page)

By 9:15, Knoth was informed that all airports in the New York City area had been shut down. Unsure of what to do, he sent an urgent message to Lufthansa’s base in Frankfurt asking for guidance. He was still almost four hours from New York. Should he continue on to the United States and possibly land elsewhere, or turn around and fly back to Germany? Turning a plane around is no easy maneuver. When one plane turns around, it has a ripple effect on every plane in the air, and so it needs to be carefully choreographed.

A decision needed to be made quickly. Knoth was approaching the halfway point in the Atlantic, thirty degrees longitude; the invisible line of no return for airline pilots. Once pilots cross that mark, they are usually committed to flying to their destination. As he waited for instructions, Knoth wondered about the 354 passengers aboard his plane, Lufthansa Flight 400. Were any of them a threat? If there were terrorists on board, they might have been waiting until the plane was closer to the United States before trying something. Knoth glanced behind him to the cockpit door. It wasn’t very sturdy. And then he realized something else: it wasn’t even locked.

Bonnie Harris, Constable Oz Fudge, and Linda Humby.
Courtesy of Jim DeFede

H
arold O’Reilly didn’t want to think about his birthday. And he certainly didn’t want any fuss just because he was turning fifty. He’d work his regular shift at Gander’s air-traffic control center and then celebrate that night by going out to dinner with his wife and family. Located less than a mile from Gander International Airport, the center, commonly referred to as ATC, is a bunkerlike building that keeps track of all flights between Europe and North America. Every day nearly a thousand flights cross the Atlantic. To keep these planes from bumping into one another, there are approximately forty controllers on duty, each responsible for a different patch of the sky over the water. If plane is headed toward the United States, once it passes Newfoundland, the controller hands the flight over to his or her counterpart in Montreal or Boston or New York. If a plane is going to Europe, then once it reaches the other side of the ocean, the flight is given to centers in Ireland or France or Spain.

Generally speaking, being a controller in Gander is not as high-pressured as being a controller in a major metropolitan area, where you have hundreds of flights bunched together in a very small space of sky. In those centers the overriding concern is to prevent a midair collision.

Gander controllers worry about this as well, but planes flying across the Atlantic are spaced far enough apart to make it less of a threat. Instead, with long oceanic flights it’s all about the jet stream, that ribbon of air that can save a pilot fuel and help him reach his destination a little sooner. Finding the precise altitude of the stream on any given day and easing pilots into it is the art of being a controller in Gander. Gander controllers take pride in making sure pilots and their passengers get from one point on the map to another as smoothly and as comfortably as possible.

Fittingly, the inside of the building where they oversee the journeys of so many travelers has an eerily intense feel to it. There are no windows and the lights in the main rooms are kept low in order to prevent glare on the screens from disrupting the vision of the controllers. As a result, the controllers appear supernatural, bathed in the artificial glow of their own monitors as they control the skies over the Atlantic.

O’Reilly has been coming to work at the Gander ATC for twenty-eight years. He grew up in a small town of a few hundred people in a corner of Newfoundland accessible only by ferry. He was a high-school teacher for a short time, but wanted to try something different. Being an air-traffic controller certainly fit that description. And now he was the boss.

As the lead supervisor, he was the man in charge of operations. It was his center, his air. He’d been at work a couple of hours when someone told him to come see the television in the break room because a plane had just slammed into the World Trade Center. He arrived just as the second plane hit. His horror was quickly replaced by a feeling of dread that there was more to come. Obviously the airports in New York were going to be closed, O’Reilly concluded. But even he was surprised when he received a call from the air-traffic control center in Boston alerting him that all airspace in the United States had been closed.

The second piece of news from Boston: all American carriers—United, American, Delta, Continental—had to land at the nearest airport immediately. Foreign carriers had a choice: they could turn around and fly home or land in Canada, but they couldn’t come into the United States. As O’Reilly talked to Federal Aviation Administration officials in Boston, American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon.

September 11 was certainly shaping up to be an unbelievable birthday.

O’Reilly called his supervisors together. He’d worked with most of these men for years and trusted their judgment. By now everyone in the building knew about the disaster in New York, and as he briefed his supervisors, he tried to read their faces to see if any betrayed a sense of fear or apprehension. If they were scared, O’Reilly thought to himself, they certainly weren’t showing it. Instead everyone seemed anxious to confront the challenge ahead.

There were about three hundred planes in their airspace and all of them had to be rerouted and given alternate landing sites. The planes were going to have to change altitudes, change directions, and converge on a few airports in eastern Canada. Pilots were already hailing the center, trying to figure out what they were supposed to do. O’Reilly kept it simple with just one instruction for his supervisors: “Let’s just get those planes on the ground, as soon as possible, without having any accidents.”

His supervisors might not have been afraid, but O’Reilly was privately terrified that there would be an accident. It wasn’t a question of his not having confidence in the ability of his controllers. The problem in his mind was that there were just too many planes and, because they all had to land as quickly as possible, too little time to see them all in safely.

Without being called, off-duty controllers started arriving at the center within a half hour of the attacks. Eventually every controller working a screen had at least one backup and a supervisor to help. There was no real plan or thought given to which planes should land where. The controllers started dividing planes up among a handful of airports that could accommodate them. St. John’s and Stephenville in Newfoundland, Moncton in New Brunswick, Halifax in Nova Scotia, as well as the airports in larger cities like Montreal, Quebec, and even Toronto.

The key for O’Reilly, however, was Gander.

B
uilt in the mid-thirties, the airport in Gander was initially a military base shared by the United States, England, and Canada. When it opened in 1938, it was the largest airport in the world. Its runways were designed to accommodate the heaviest planes of the day, and the base played a critical role during World War II. Supplies and troops on their way to Europe from the United States needed to land in Gander to refuel for the transatlantic journey. More than 20,000 fighters and heavy bombers manufactured in the United States stopped in Gander before joining the war in Europe.

After the war, the landing field focused its attention on commercial flights. Through the late forties and fifties, most overseas commercial flights out of the United States and Canada refueled in Gander. Gander International Airport became known as the biggest gas station in the world, and as air traffic grew, so did a community. The town of Gander didn’t even exist prior to the creation of the airport and its hopes were built on the promise of aviation. Many of its streets are named for famous aviators, names like Yeager, Byrd, and Lindbergh. Even its businesses adopted an aviation theme. Gander’s most famous bar was the Flyer’s Club, a notoriously raucous pub in the center of town.

At the height of the Cold War in the sixties and seventies, Gander had another distinction. It was the spot where hundreds of people every year defected from Eastern Europe and Cuba. All of the airline traffic between Fidel Castro’s Cuba and the Soviet Union and its satellites stopped in Gander to refuel. When an Aeroflot flight between Havana and Moscow or East Berlin touched down in Gander and the passengers were allowed off the plane while it was being serviced, some of the passengers invariably would ask Canadian officials for asylum. For a time Gander was dubbed “defection heaven.”

So many East Germans defected in Gander that West Germany actually set up special consulate offices there to help the asylum seekers reach their ultimate goal of getting to the democratic side of their divided nation. For many, the quickest path from East Berlin to West Berlin didn’t involve jumping the wall, but flying through Gander. Of course, not everyone defected. Castro stopped in Gander on so many occasions that locals have lost track of the precise number. During one lengthy layover, a local resident even took the Cuban dictator on a toboggan ride through town.

The advent of the jet engine in the sixties, however, was the beginning of the end of Gander’s prosperity. And the introduction of the Boeing 747 in 1970, with its increased fuel capacity and longer flying times, was a technological breakthrough that guaranteed Gander’s demise as a commercial airline hub. As more and more airlines replaced their aging fleets with these newer aircraft, the town named after a male goose started feeling the heat. Property prices fell as many airlines pulled out of Gander completely.

The eighties and nineties found Gander’s airport used primarily as a refueling stop by a few charter outfits and the American military. On December 12, 1985, an Arrow Air charter flight crashed a half mile from the airport shortly after takeoff, killing everyone on board, including 248 members of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division. They were on their way home to North Carolina for Christmas following a peacekeeping mission in the Sinai Peninsula. The Arrow crash remains the worst airplane disaster in Canada’s history.

For the past three decades Gander has remained a frequent stopover point for private and corporate jets. Celebrities and CEOs of major corporations have visited the airport’s DVL—Distinguished Visitors’ Lounge—before continuing on their trip to Cannes or London or Rome. Airport employees have grown used to seeing folks like Frank Sinatra, John Wayne, Lee Iacocca, John Travolta, Oprah Winfrey, Brad Pitt, Nicole Kidman, or Tom Cruise. In the last twenty years, at least twenty-five heads of state have passed through Gander.

At the start of the new millennium, Gander’s civic pride in aviation matters rested on the airport’s designation a few years before as an alternate site for the Space Shuttle to land if it has to abort its mission shortly after takeoff. And now, on September 11, for the same reason it was considered a suitable landing site for the Space Shuttle—it has an unusually long main runway—Harold O’Reilly knew it would be the ideal place to handle a sky full of jumbo jets with nowhere to land.

The irony of the situation was not lost on O’Reilly. The very same planes that had rendered Gander’s airport largely obsolete were now going to be forced to seek shelter there.

T
he television set in Gander’s town hall didn’t have cable. The local stations had interrupted their regular programming for bulletins out of New York, but the reception wasn’t very good. Nevertheless, town employees gathered around and gazed in horror. Mayor Elliott watched for a few minutes and then decided to go home, where he could follow the coverage on CNN.

Inside his house, he stared at his television in absolute disbelief. As the towers became engulfed in flames, he kept glancing at the word
LIVE
in the corner of the screen. This wasn’t some movie, he thought to himself, this was actually happening right now. Before long, Elliott received a phone call from the town manager. Officials at the airport had called. U.S. airspace was closed and a lot of planes were being diverted to Canada. It looked like Gander was going to be receiving a sizable portion of them, perhaps as many as fifty planes.

“What about the passengers?” Elliott asked.

For now, he was told, the plan was to allow the jets to land, but to hold all of the passengers on board until U.S. airspace opened up again and the planes could take off. They would probably be on the ground for only a few hours.

Elliott knew better. Watching events unfold on his television, he could see that the United States was in a state of chaos. The whereabouts of the president were unclear. The American military was mobilizing. Nobody seemed to have an understanding of what was happening. This was obviously going to take time to sort out, certainly more than a few hours. The mayor then started doing the math. If there were fifty planes en route, with an average of 250 passengers and crew members on each plane, they could easily have more than 12,000 people landing in Gander in the next few hours. Even if they never got off the plane, just having to feed that many people would be a tremendous undertaking for a town the size of Gander.

Elliott didn’t want to get caught flat-footed. The town needed to start getting ready in case the passengers were going to be stranded there overnight. The town opened its emergency operations center—a room inside town hall—and started contacting local groups to place them on alert that it might need their assistance.

G
eoff Tucker was already making preparations at the airport. He’d worked at Gander International for nineteen years and was now the vice-president of the local airport authority. With the airport director out of town for a conference, Tucker was the man in charge.

He was alerted to the attacks in New York by Bruce Terris, the supervisor up in the airport’s tower. Right away Tucker knew the ripple from such a catastrophe would find its way to Gander. “The lifeboat of the North Atlantic” is the way he always referred to Gander International. Every pilot who flies to the United States from Europe knows exactly where Gander is located. If there is a serious mechanical problem over the ocean or a passenger has a heart attack or goes berserk with a case of air rage, the pilot makes an emergency landing in Gander.