Gander: The Airport at the Edge of the World

Milepost Two Thirteen

In nineteen thirty-six, nine hundred labourers stepped off a train in the middle of Newfoundland and started cutting down trees. There was nothing there. No town, no road, no settlement of any kind. Just wetlands, boreal forest, and a flat stretch of ground near the north shore of Gander Lake. The men had been sent to build the biggest gamble in aviation history — an airport in the wilderness, designed for aircraft that did not yet exist, to serve airline routes that had not yet been flown. The train stop was called Milepost Two Thirteen, because that was its distance in miles from St. John's. Some workers called the place Hattie's Camp, after a lumber man who had once cut wood nearby. There was no Hattie's Camp. There was nothing at all.

The gamble came out of a nineteen thirty-five agreement between Newfoundland, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Ireland. Everyone understood that passenger aircraft capable of crossing the Atlantic would arrive sooner or later. And when they did, the planes would need somewhere to refuel on the eastern edge of North America. Newfoundland sat right along the great circle route, the shortest air distance between London and New York. A survey team picked the flat ground near Gander Lake because it was relatively fog-free and close to the railway. By the end of nineteen thirty-seven, the construction crew had built four runways, a hangar, radio equipment, a power plant, a post office, and a movie theatre. On January eleventh, nineteen thirty-eight, Captain Douglas Fraser brought a little Fox Moth biplane down onto the runway. It was the first aircraft to ever land at what was then called the Newfoundland Airport. Within two years, it would be the largest airport on the planet.

The Ferry Command

The timing was extraordinary. The airport was barely operational when the Second World War broke out in September nineteen thirty-nine. Suddenly, the most easterly land-based airport in North America was not just useful — it was strategically vital. Gander could serve as a refuelling point for Allied aircraft heading to Europe. It could provide the greatest range for anti-submarine patrols over the western Atlantic. And in enemy hands, it would be a nightmare — a potential entry point for Nazi forces reaching into North America. The Governor of Newfoundland, Sir Humphrey Walwyn, fired off a telegram to London warning that no plan existed for the airport's active defence.

By nineteen forty, the Royal Canadian Air Force had taken control. The sleepy construction site transformed into a massive military operation. Ten thousand Canadian, British, and American personnel lived in Gander at its wartime peak. The Royal Canadian Navy set up a listening post to track enemy submarines by intercepting their radio transmissions. But the airport's most critical mission was the ferry command. In November nineteen forty, Captain D.C.T. Bennett left Gander leading a fleet of seven Lockheed Hudson bombers across the Atlantic during the Battle of Britain. More than twenty thousand North American-built fighters and heavy bombers would follow over the next five years, each one stopping at Gander to refuel before the long crossing to England. The runway that had been built on a gamble was now an assembly line for air power.

The Royal Canadian Navy's radio station listened around the clock for the faint transmissions of German U-boats prowling the shipping lanes. Gander had become, almost overnight, one of the most important pieces of real estate in the Allied war effort. By nineteen forty-five, the airfield had grown to include four runways, hundreds of buildings — barracks, hangars, a hospital — and the most advanced communications system available. Nine years earlier, the site had been an undeveloped patch of wetland with no inhabitants and no roads. Now it was a military city.

Crossroads of the World

When the war ended, the military handed the airport back to civilian control, and something remarkable happened. Gander became glamorous. In the late nineteen forties and through the fifties, no propeller-driven airliner could cross the Atlantic without stopping for fuel. Pan American, Trans World Airlines, BOAC, Air France, SAS, KLM, Sabena, Trans-Canada Airlines — they all came through Gander. By the mid-fifties, the airport was handling thirteen thousand aircraft a year and a quarter of a million passengers. It was one of the busiest international airports in the world.

The Canadian government decided this gateway deserved a terminal to match its importance. In nineteen fifty-nine, Queen Elizabeth the Second herself opened a gleaming new international departures lounge. The space was a showcase of mid-century modern design — geometric terrazzo floors inspired by Piet Mondrian, furniture by Charles and Ray Eames and Arne Jacobsen, a dramatic bronze sculpture called Birds of Welcome by Arthur Price, and dominating one wall, a twenty-two-metre mural called Flight and Its Allegories by the Canadian painter Kenneth Lochhead. Lochhead was one of the artists who brought modernism to Canada, and the mural depicted human figures enacting the stages of flight against a backdrop of Canadian nature. The lounge was meant to show the world that Canada was a forward-thinking, cosmopolitan nation. Design experts would later call it the single most important modernist room in the country.

And through this room walked everyone. Frank Sinatra. Marlene Dietrich. Fidel Castro. Winston Churchill. Leonard Cohen. Marilyn Monroe. The Beatles touched down in Gander in nineteen sixty-four — the first time they set foot on North American soil, and it was not in New York. It was in Newfoundland. Star-gazing at the airport became a local pastime. Residents would drive out to the terminal just to see who might be passing through the lounge that evening.

The Spy Planes and the Soviet Jets

The Cold War drew hard lines across the globe, but Gander remained a strange neutral zone. American spy planes and Soviet jetliners shared the same runway apron — one of the few places on earth where that happened. In the early nineteen eighties, the daily rhythm at Gander included Ilyushin jets from Aeroflot, Czechoslovak Airlines, Cubana, Interflug out of East Germany, and LOT Polish Airlines. The Soviet and Eastern Bloc carriers used older aircraft with limited range — planes like the Ilyushin Il-sixty-two and the Il-eighty-six — that simply could not make the full crossing from Moscow to Havana without stopping for fuel. So they stopped in Gander, and Gander became the seam between two worlds.

Word spread. People behind the Iron Curtain learned that if you were on a Moscow-to-Havana flight, there would be a moment on the ground in Canada. A moment with Canadian soil underfoot and the RCMP within shouting distance. Defectors began stepping off planes. A Soviet chess player and pianist named Igor Vasilyevich Ivanov. A Cuban Olympic swimmer named Rafael Polinario. And, remarkably, Phan Thi Kim Phuc — the Vietnamese girl famously photographed as a naked child fleeing a napalmed village — she too sought asylum during a stop at Gander.

A Bulgarian sculptor named Luben Boykov was on a flight from Eastern Europe with his wife and baby when the plane landed in Gander. The Soviet crew tried to stop them from leaving.

When we tried to leave the aircraft, some of the Soviet Russian crew tried to pull the baby away from my wife. They wanted to keep her on board and prevent us from leaving.

His wife would not let go of the child. The Boykovs found an emergency exit under the belly of the aircraft, climbed down a service ladder, and dropped onto the tarmac. The RCMP were waiting on the ground to escort them into the terminal. Boykov would go on to become one of Newfoundland's most celebrated artists. His Terry Fox Memorial stands in St. John's today.

A Cuban musician — a young woman identified in reports only as Charles — was travelling with a band from Havana back to the Soviet Union when the plane stopped to refuel. She had told no one about her plan.

When it stopped in Gander, I decided, I'm just going to stay. My group was sitting there, having tea. And I just walked away.

She knew the cost. Leaving was considered treason. She could never go back, never contact her family, never fly through any airport where she might be intercepted. One night in Gander, then a flight to Halifax, then four months at the Pier Twenty-One immigration facility while the RCMP interviewed her repeatedly, puzzled by a young woman with no relatives in Canada and a passport full of stamps from Germany and other countries. They kept asking if she was a spy.

The tightening of customs and immigration policy eventually made defections harder, and the Eastern Bloc airlines shifted their routes. The Cold War traffic that had kept Gander alive through the seventies and eighties dried up. The airport grew quieter.

The Screaming Eagles

On the morning of December twelfth, nineteen eighty-five, Gander experienced its darkest hour. A chartered Arrow Air DC-eight had arrived from Cologne carrying two hundred and forty-eight American soldiers — nearly all of them members of the one-hundred-and-first Airborne Division, the famous Screaming Eagles — heading home to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, after a peacekeeping mission in the Sinai Desert. They were due home just in time for Christmas.

The old DC-eight refuelled at Gander while the soldiers stretched their legs inside the terminal. Then they reboarded for the final leg. Shortly after six forty-five in the morning Newfoundland time, the aircraft began its takeoff roll on runway twenty-two. It lifted off, climbed briefly, and then stalled. Witnesses on the highway saw a bright glow. The plane struck terrain just beyond the end of the runway, broke apart, hit an unoccupied shed, and exploded. The fuel load intended for the long flight to Kentucky fed an enormous fire. All two hundred and fifty-six people on board — the two hundred and forty-eight soldiers and eight crew members — were killed. Autopsy reports would later reveal that most did not die on impact, but in the fire that followed minutes later.

It remains the deadliest aviation accident ever to occur on Canadian soil. The investigation split the Canadian Aviation Safety Board down the middle. Five of nine members concluded that ice on the wings and an underestimated takeoff weight were the probable cause. Four dissented, arguing that an in-flight explosion of unknown origin may have been responsible. The bitter disagreement would never be resolved. It delayed changes to de-icing procedures across Canada, and the resulting lack of confidence in the Safety Board led the government to shut it down entirely in nineteen ninety, replacing it with a new independent agency — the Transportation Safety Board of Canada.

A memorial at the crash site overlooks Gander Lake. The scar in the earth is still visible from the ground and by satellite, more than forty years later. In Fort Campbell, another memorial stands for the soldiers who never made it home for Christmas.

The Day the Planes Came Back

For sixteen years after the Arrow Air disaster, Gander settled into a quiet rhythm. A handful of regional flights. Some cargo. The occasional military aircraft. The great modernist lounge sat mostly empty, a time capsule from an era of glamour that no longer needed a refuelling stop in Newfoundland. The town's population hovered around ten thousand. And then came September eleventh, two thousand and one.

When the attacks hit the World Trade Center, the Federal Aviation Administration closed all American airspace. Transport Canada followed suit. Dozens of transatlantic flights were suddenly over the ocean with nowhere to land. And the old instructions, the ones that had been in place since the airport's founding, kicked in again. Gander was on the great circle route. Gander had the runways. Transport Canada directed inbound flights away from Toronto and Montreal and sent them to the smaller airports along the eastern seaboard. Thirty-eight airliners landed in Gander — planes from Lufthansa, Air France, British Airways, Alitalia, Olympic Airways, and others — carrying six thousand six hundred passengers and crew from ninety-five countries.

The population of Gander increased by nearly seventy percent in a matter of hours. There were five hundred hotel rooms in the area. The math did not work. So the town improvised. Schools became dormitories. The hockey rink became a walk-in refrigerator. Church halls and community centres filled with cots. Volunteers drove in from surrounding communities to cook meals, collect toiletries, offer spare bedrooms, hand out clothing, and simply talk to people who were frightened, confused, and far from home.

The passengers — the plane people, as they came to be called — stayed for up to five days. Some formed friendships that endure to this day. Lufthansa was so moved by the reception that the airline named a new Airbus A three-forty, registration Delta-Alpha-India-Foxtrot-Charlie, after both Gander and Halifax. It was the first aircraft in the Lufthansa fleet to carry a city name from outside Germany.

It was a great atmosphere as far as morale was concerned, everybody was dedicated to providing a service — because that was the key to it all. If you didn't provide a service, then the airport would have fallen apart.

The story of those five days became the basis for Come From Away, a musical that premiered on Broadway in two thousand and seventeen and won the Tony Award. A filmed version appeared on Apple TV Plus. Suddenly, Gander was famous again — not for runways or fuel stops, but for kindness.

The Most Important Room

Today, Gander International Airport handles a handful of domestic flights a day, mostly nineteen-seat turboprops to other communities in eastern Canada. Twenty percent of business jets crossing the North Atlantic still stop there, and airlines routinely list it as a preferred diversion point for in-flight emergencies, because the runways that were built for wartime bombers can still handle anything. The military still uses the field, sharing it through Canadian Forces Base Gander, though the military flights do not pay landing fees — a sore point for an airport authority trying to stay self-sufficient.

But the real draw now is the lounge. After years of debate — heritage advocates against an airport authority that argued it was in the business of running an airport, not a museum — a one-and-a-half-million-dollar restoration project brought the departures lounge back to life. It reopened for public tours in June two thousand and twenty-two, and more than a hundred thousand visitors have walked through it since. Kenneth Lochhead's twenty-two-metre mural still stretches across the wall. Arthur Price's Birds of Welcome still stands in the centre of the room. The Mondrian-inspired terrazzo floors, the Eames and Jacobsen chairs, the floating staircase and the floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the runway — all of it original, all of it intact.

In March two thousand and twenty-six, the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador officially designated the lounge a Registered Heritage Structure, recognising it as a rare and well-preserved architectural landmark within Canada's aviation heritage and the last intact representation of the era when the Canadian government commissioned the country's best architects, designers, and artists to create international terminals that would project Canada onto the world stage.

The joke locals tell is that Gander is the most cosmopolitan backwater on Earth. A place built for aircraft that did not yet exist, on a route that would become obsolete within a generation, in a town that had to be constructed because there was no town to begin with. Every chapter in the story of twentieth-century aviation — the transatlantic gamble, the wartime ferry command, the golden age of propeller travel, the jet age and its bypasses, the Cold War and its defectors, the worst air disaster in Canadian history, the kindness of strangers on the worst day in recent American memory — all of it happened here, at Milepost Two Thirteen, where nine hundred men once stepped off a train into the forest and started building the future.