The Day The World Came To Town Read online

  The scene was no less emotional for fellow passenger Maria O’Driscoll. Although the two women didn’t know each other, the seventy-year-old O’Driscoll was born in County Louth, a stone’s throw from O’Rourke’s birthplace. O’Driscoll had come to the United States when she was a young woman. Her reason was simple: “I fell in love with a Yank.” That was back in 1954.

  Standing alongside her at the airport in Dublin was her husband, Lenny.

  Lenny O’Driscoll wasn’t “the Yank” that prompted Maria to move to America. That fellow, Maria’s first husband, died in 1987. When Lenny met Maria a short time later, he, too, had lost a spouse. They married in 1993, and since then, they had been over to Ireland almost every year.

  The occasion for this trip—not that they ever needed one—was the wedding of Maria’s niece. Of her six brothers and sisters, Maria had been the only one to come to America. They all stayed in the Irish Sea town of Dundalk.

  Lenny’s ancestors were Irish, but he was born in Newfoundland, so the good-byes every year at the end of their trip weren’t as painful to him as they were to Maria. He knew she would be sad and quiet on the flight home. There must be a way to cheer her up, he thought. He decided he’d think it over as soon as the plane took off.

  How aboot this weather?”

  “Beautiful.”

  “Delightful.”

  “Cold’s gonna come soon, buddy.”

  “And the snow.”

  “Ay, she’s gotta come sometime.”

  Inside the local coffee shop, the unseasonably warm weather was all anyone could talk about, including Gander mayor Claude Elliott. Since becoming mayor in 1996, Elliott liked to start each morning at Tim Horton’s, the Canadian equivalent of Starbucks. Elliott rode to political power on the strength of a snowmobile—or, as they are more commonly referred to in Gander, a Ski-doo. In 1989, members of the town council wanted to ban Ski-doos from operating inside the city limits. Elliott helped lead an uprising against the ban, and in 1990 he was elected to the town council.

  Like any small-town mayor, Elliott knew how important it was to keep in touch with what folks were talking about. On this day it was the weather. This was the warmest September anyone could recall in a decade. Temperatures were around twenty-one degrees Celsius, about seventy degrees Fahrenheit.

  The local economy was another coffee-klatch topic. The unemployment rate in Gander wasn’t as high as on the rest of the island, but people were still looking for new ways to stimulate business. They’d certainly had their boondoggles. A few years before, they attempted to turn Gander into ski resort, a project that had ultimately failed.

  After an hour or so at the coffeehouse, the mayor headed over to town hall.

  Meanwhile, Oz Fudge was making the morning rounds in his patrol car. One of only two town constables in Gander, Fudge used to be with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. That was more than twenty years ago. For the last fifteen years, the forty-seven-year-old has worked exclusively for the town.

  In Gander, the RCMP handles investigations into serious crimes, and Fudge handles more community-oriented problems. He makes traffic stops and helps round up stray animals. If a husband and wife are arguing a little too loud for the neighbors, Fudge calms them down. If a couple of knuckle-heads start throwing punches in a bar, Fudge is the one to break them up.

  He doesn’t carry a gun, doesn’t like them, and as far as he’s concerned, he doesn’t need one. Guns only make people nervous. A few years ago, the RCMP provided him with a bulletproof vest. There had been some drug smuggling in the area, and since Fudge was making traffic stops, the Mounties were concerned he might inadvertently pull over a gun-toting smuggler on his way through town. Fudge wore it for two weeks, but took it off because it was so darn uncomfortable. He hasn’t worn it since.

  Fudge was born in Lewisporte—about forty minutes from Gander—where his father used to work out at the military base. Fudge and his wife, whom he refers to as “the War Department,” have three kids. He named his oldest son after his favorite actor, Jimmy Stewart, who starred in his favorite movie, It’s a Wonderful Life. He coaches his daughter’s basketball team. The team’s not very good, but then again, he’s not much of a coach. It’s all for fun anyway.

  A school bus drivers’ strike in the district meant most kids were either walking to school that morning or being dropped off by their parents, so Fudge was paying close attention to the crosswalks and streets nearest the schools to make sure no one was speeding. Once the kids were tucked away in school, he continued on with his normal patrol.

  The streets in Gander are laid out in an unusual fashion. Rather than laying out a simple grid, the town’s forefathers thought it would be unique to twist and turn the main perimeter roads into the profile of a male goose’s head. Memorial Drive forms the base of the neck; Elizabeth Drive curves up to form the back and top of the head and then swoops back down to meet with Edinburgh Street to create the bird’s beak. When most people look at a map of the town, the gander image doesn’t strike them right away, but as soon as someone points it out, it’s impossible to miss. Trees line most of the streets in Gander, while the majority of homes are modest, two-story structures with small, neatly trimmed lawns and backyards. And although the town is relatively flat, it sits perched above Lake Gander, a long thin body of water that feeds into the Gander River and ultimately the Atlantic Ocean. Fudge liked the quiet nature of his town. And on this morning, he’d seen nothing out of the ordinary.

  By midmorning Fudge was sitting in his patrol car in the parking lot of the curling club, wondering how he was going to keep himself busy for the rest of the day, when Bonnie Harris ran up. “Turn on the radio,” she yelled. “You’re not going to believe what’s going on.”

  Fudge flipped over to the CBC radio news channel.

  “Holy God,” he cried, and then sped off for town hall.

  Halfway between Frankfurt and New York City, Captain Reinhard Knoth switched his plane’s radio to Unicom, a frequency shared by all pilots. Unicom allows planes from different airlines to pass information to one another about weather conditions or delays at airports. A pilot for Lufthansa for thirty years, Knoth had made this transatlantic run more times than he could remember. He was flying an older-model 747, his altitude was 30,000 feet, and he was cruising along at just under six hundred miles per hour. The sky was blue, the air calm, the horizon clear. Turning on the autopilot, Knoth was listening to the casual banter between planes when a pilot for KLM broke in excitedly. “There’s something happening in New York,” the captain declared. “An accident.”

  Knoth turned his radio to the commercial frequency for the BBC. The station was broadcasting live from New York, and the announcer reported an explosion at the World Trade Center, possibly caused by an airplane crashing into the North Tower. Knoth was dumbfounded. He looked over at his copilot and his flight engineer to make sure they heard this as well.

  How could a plane crash into one of the towers? It didn’t seem possible. His copilot speculated it must have been a small, private plane. Maybe the pilot had a heart attack or blacked out. Even so, what were the odds of a plane accidentally hitting a skyscraper? There was that time back in 1945, they recalled, when an army pilot, lost in fog, crashed his B-25 into the Empire State Building. But that was so long ago, and approach patterns and the rules for flying over Manhattan were different now. As they talked, the BBC broadcast caught their attention once again.

  “…another explosion…a second plane has hit the World Trade Center!”

  A second plane? Two planes had hit the towers? Clearly, this wasn’t an accident. It was 9:03 A.M. in New York, and Knoth bounced from one radio frequency to another, scavenging bits of information. One fact was certain: even with a gun to his head, no airline pilot would deliberately crash his plane into the Trade Center. Knoth knew someone other than the pilot must have been flying those planes.

  Knoth wasn’t the only person to realize this. On Unicom, pilots were alerting one ano
ther to be careful. Every plane in the air could be a possible target for hijackers. With each passing minute, the voices of pilots broadcasting over Unicom grew more frantic. Did anyone know which airlines were involved? Was it American? United? Delta? Did anyone hear a flight number? How many other planes were unaccounted for? One? Two? Five? Nine?

  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.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Bonnie Harris, Constable Oz Fudge, and Linda Humby.

  Courtesy of Jim DeFede

  Harold 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.

  Built 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 notorio
usly 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.