The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland

by Jim DeFede

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.

When one plane turns around, it has a ripple effect on every plane in the air, and so it needs to be carefully choreographed.

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.

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.

How do you provide a rational explanation for such an irrational act?

How could somebody do something so evil, something that adversely affected so many innocent lives? How could somebody have so much hatred for America?