How 38 Diverted Planes on 9/11 Turned Gander, Newfoundland, Into a Symbol of Kindness

On September 11, 2001, Virgin Airlines Flight 75 set off from Manchester bound for Orlando, Florida, carrying an extraordinary group of travelers. Among those on board were 90 terminally ill children, each making the long journey across the Atlantic with the Make-A-Wish Foundation to experience a dream trip to Disney World.

But when the plane finally landed, the children peering through the cabin windows did not see Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse or the bright welcome they had imagined. Instead, they were met by the stark sight of armed, solemn police officers encircling the aircraft, determined to rule out any possible threat among those on board.

That aircraft was the first of 38 fully loaded passenger planes diverted to Gander, a remote airport in Newfoundland, Canada, during the chaos of that day 25 years ago — the same place I visited this week.

Today, Gander International Airport is a quiet outpost, receiving only around five small flights a day. Passengers arriving there, no matter what conditions they left behind, often find themselves walking across the tarmac through rain, wind or snow toward a terminal that still carries the feel of the 1950s. But on September 11, 2001, the aircraft kept coming. What followed was an extraordinary five-day chapter of fear, generosity and human connection — a rare beam of hope in the shadow of the Al Qaeda terror attacks — that would later inspire books, documentaries and the globally celebrated musical Come From Away.

The emergency diversions happened after the United States, shaken by the 9/11 attacks and fearful that more hijackings could follow, made the unprecedented decision under President George W. Bush to shut down American airspace.

From a bunker beneath the White House, shortly after the fourth hijacked aircraft went down in a field in Pennsylvania, U.S. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta reportedly barked an urgent order to his staff: “Get those goddamn planes down.”

Civilian aircraft already in the skies over the United States were instructed to land without delay. International flights heading toward America were told to reverse course or divert to airports outside the country. Any plane that crossed into U.S. airspace risked being treated as a hostile aircraft and shot down.

Positioned on the far eastern edge of North America, Newfoundland juts deep into the Atlantic Ocean. Gander had been deliberately built near the “Great Circle” flight path used by many transatlantic routes between Europe and North America, making it a natural refuge when the order came to clear the skies.

What happened next — as a town of just 9,600 people opened its doors to almost 7,000 exhausted, bewildered and frightened passengers from 92 countries — remains one of the most moving and uplifting stories connected to September 11.

Operation Yellow Ribbon, as it was known, has been hailed as a modern parable of compassion, community spirit and the kindness of strangers.

The musical it inspired, Come From Away (which takes its name from the description Newfoundlanders give to visitors from everywhere else) has been a huge hit – winning four Olivier awards in the West End and a Tony on Broadway. It has played across Europe, South Korea and the Philippines.

More than 50,000 people have travelled to Gander to see the production now running in a theatre in the airport building.

And as I discovered this week in a place where everyone brandishes their own 9/11 scrapbook, few in this close-knit community have forgotten their five days of glory while the world waited for the US to reopen its airspace and they shared their town.

Gander was famous once before when its location earned it the nickname of ‘Crossroads of the World’. The airport – around which the town gradually grew – was built in the late 1930s largely at the instigation of Britain as an essential transatlantic refuelling stop for propeller planes.

After the war, it was used heavily by airlines and – after its stylishly modernistic international lounge (including the celebrated Big Dipper bar) was opened by Queen Elizabeth in 1959 – it became the perfect star-spotting location. Humphrey Bogart, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles were among those who touched down on its beautiful orange and yellow leather banquettes. (Sinatra was famously told off for queue-jumping at the Big Dipper bar by a local – Newfoundlanders pride themselves on being unimpressed by celebrity).

But the advent of jumbo jets which could carry far more fuel meant air traffic from Gander dwindled, although its possession of two huge but underused runways – at one time the biggest in the world – ensured that it could be very useful in an emergency.

They’d never planned for an event like 9/11, Claude Elliott, Gander’s mayor at the time, told me. Many locals imagined the planes would only be there for a few hours but he suspected it would be considerably longer.

The local Red Cross organised accommodation while the Salvation Army distributed food. With the local radio and TV stations broadcasting a call to ‘lend a hand, do what you can’, schools and non-essential businesses were closed in Gander and the surrounding smaller townships so everyone could volunteer.

Newfies, as Newfoundlanders are known, are famous for their generosity and communal spirit – qualities that they attribute to the fact that their hardy fisherman ancestors, who mostly came from Ireland, Devon and Cornwall, had to rely heavily on each other as they struggled to survive in a harsh environment with ferocious winters. (Newfoundland – nicknamed The Rock – only reluctantly voted to leave the British Empire and become part of Canada in 1949).

In Gander, the planes were parked nose to tail on one of the runways but passengers couldn’t alight until police and the town’s sole immigration officer had assured themselves they weren’t letting a terrorist slip through.

Some passengers had to wait up to 12 hours cooped up on the runway before they were allowed off and – after running a gauntlet of metal detectors and pat-downs – allowed into the airport terminal.

They had virtually nothing with them as their main luggage was kept locked in the cargo hold. Some even thought they were being abducted.

A convoy of school buses, whose drivers had called off a strike as soon as they heard of the influx, were waiting outside to take them to various destinations – schools, churches, social organisations and even a Salvation Army summer camp outside town. (Gander’s 550 hotel rooms were reserved for aircraft crews.)

US officials initially requested the passengers from each plane remain together and didn’t want them staying in people’s houses because they were still concerned some might be terrorists. The airlines also wanted to keep them together in case they were given the all-clear to fly.

It made for some strange roommates as the denizens of First Class and Economy found themselves having to bed down next to each other on mattresses or camp beds on the floor of a school gym or recreation hall.

Prominent passengers included Werner Baldessarini, the chairman of fashion giant Hugo Boss, who’d been heading to New York Fashion Week; a US Army general in charge of intelligence; former supermodel Marisa Berenson, and the wife and children of Cheers star Woody Harrelson.

None of them asked for special treatment and when Mr Baldessarini was offered a Saudi Arabian prince’s private jet to come and pick him up, he politely declined insisting he had to see out the drama with his fellow passengers – although he did accept a consignment of clean underwear brought to him by a member of staff at his nearest store in St John’s, a three-hour drive away.

The ‘Plane People’ as the locals called them, were treated less like refugees and more like long-lost relatives. Many would later say they were profoundly moved by the friendship shown to them – the perfect antidote to the 9/11 horrors that, after hours in agonising ignorance about what had happened, they could finally see in TV reports.

There were initially significant tensions between some US and Middle Eastern passengers, Gander’s current mayor, Percy Farwell, told me, but they dissipated ‘once everyone realised they were all in it together – it’s a great equaliser’. Some passengers, too desperate to wait, ‘mutinied’ and hired a bus to take them to the US border 650 miles away.

With requests broadcast on local TV, every Gander business donated supplies for free. Pharmacies filled prescriptions for those whose vital medication remained with their luggage on the planes, a local telephone company set up a bank of 100 phones the passengers could use day or night to make international calls to worried loved ones.

A local toyshop cleared out its warehouse and, lights blazing, a Gander fire engine roared around town handing it all out to the visiting children.

The generosity continued on a personal level. Gander people gave them their bedding, their clothing, their food and their time. Gander is not the most prepossessing place – more a sprawling suburb of housing estates, business parks and retail strips than a conventional town. At the time it reportedly had just four sets of traffic lights.

The Newfies took people off on fishing expeditions and hikes, entertained them at night with karaoke, live music and drinks in the pub, and treated them to local delicacies such as ‘bottled moose’.

Many invited Plane People to come and take a shower or even – if they looked particularly worn out – stay in their house.

Bonnie Harris, who runs the local animal shelter, scrabbled around in plane cargo holds to rescue 19 ‘forgotten’ pets which were then looked after in an aircraft hangar.

When local police officer Oz Fudge, famous for hugging any Plane Person he thought needed it, heard that several of the terminally-ill British children who’d been on that Virgin flight had birthdays, he helped organise a Disney-themed party for all 350 passengers on their plane.

A shop baked a 14ft-long cake, there were clowns and a sea of balloons while Constable Fudge’s daughter and her friends dressed up as Disney princesses.

The children eventually had to fly back to the UK and never made it to Disney World but one of the birthday girls’ fathers revealed to Constable Fudge she’d admitted she enjoyed herself so much in Gander it didn’t matter. ‘That tore the heart right out of me,’ he said.

Even romance blossomed among the Plane People. Nick Marson, an oil industry engineer from the UK and Diane Gray, a buyer for a Texas department store, flirted for days as they slept feet apart in a school gym and then kissed on the bus back to their plane. They married a year later and honeymooned in the place where they first met.

The generosity of the Newfies could be overwhelming. When a local school requested loo rolls, they rapidly received enough rolls to last a year. So much fresh food was donated that the town’s ice rink was turned into a giant fridge.

Down at the local branch of the Royal Canadian Legion, where 67 Aer Lingus passengers shared the hall floor, Legion stalwart Beulah Cooper (who inspired one of the main characters in the musical) epitomises the Gander spirit.

‘I don’t shake hands, I’m a hugger,’ she informed me. Her first reaction on learning that so many planes were landing in Gander, she said, was to think: ‘Thank God they’re coming here because I know they will be looked after’.

And they certainly were. ‘The day they left here we all lined up at the bar and sang For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow and So Long it’s Been Good to Know You, and there weren’t many dry eyes that went out that door.’

Beulah, now 85, who put up three women in her own home, kept passengers’ spirits up with trays of sandwiches and a limitless supply of saucy jokes.

She particularly bonded with an Irish-American passenger named Hannah O’Rourke who was frantically worried about her son Kevin, a New York firefighter, who had gone missing in the World Trade Centre. Beulah’s own son was a volunteer firefighter and she walked Hannah to church to pray.

The O’Rourkes later discovered their son had indeed died but – like so many of the relationships forged in Gander which have continued in the subsequent decades – the two women remained friends for years until Hannah died of cancer in 2025.

Why has what happened at Gander resonated so profoundly with people? Former mayor Claude Elliott believes his town ‘restored faith in people’ after the nightmare of September 11.

‘We like to say that on the 11th you saw the worst of man, and then on the 12th you saw the best,’ he said. ‘Right now, with our world in such a mess, people are looking for a good news story and this is the one they are grabbing onto.’

As if to prove his point, minutes later he’s embraced in the airport terminal by Charlotte Bayford, from Colchester, Essex, who has seen the Gander musical 60 times and has flown to the town with friends to see it again. She said she found it inspiring to find so much ‘kindness and compassion’ in a true story.

The visitors started arriving on a Tuesday and had gone by Sunday – many looking far more emotional than when they’d arrived. ‘I’m not sure we could have gone on many more days – people were exhausted,’ said Mr Elliott.

‘Gander was lonely when they all left, said Beulah Cooper. ‘But it did your heart good to know you were part of it.’

The passengers not only left $60,000 to help pay for their stay but some also contributed $85,000 worth of new computers to a local school while others set up a $2million scholarship fund to help young Newfoundlanders attend university.

Many continue to return to see old friends even as – thanks largely to the musical – Gander has become a tourist attraction.

The idea that an event as horrific as 9/11 could spawn a musical seems outrageous, but it speaks volumes for a little town’s ability to conjure a small heartwarming triumph out of a heartbreaking disaster.