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SPEAKER_13: And nice pronunciation of Newfoundland, by the way. A lot of people say New-fin-lund, and it's a bit of a sore spot with us locals. That is Newfoundland native Luke Quinton.
SPEAKER_13: And I want to take us to a different part of the island, to a little town on the northeastern side called Gander.
SPEAKER_06: Now looking back, I was all of 20 years old at the time, though I thought I was ancient. It's Christmas Eve 1972, and Ian Blackmore is working.
SPEAKER_13: My name is Ian Blackmore, and I was a photographer with the Gander beacon after I finished high school,
SPEAKER_06: and before I went to college in Toronto.
SPEAKER_13: Ian's coworker, Gerald Vokey, was an editor on the same local paper. He's going to help tell this story. It was Christmas Eve, and their mother was getting things ready for Santa Claus.
SPEAKER_15: Gerald was home that day in 1972. His family was getting ready for Christmas, and he wanted to get his daughter out of the house.
SPEAKER_13: So they decided to go hang out at the local airport. As you do. As you do when you live in a tiny town in Canada, and the airport is the best thing around. Also, this is not a normal airport, but we'll get to that soon. You never knew with the airport being up there who might come through at any given time,
SPEAKER_06: regardless of the hour or the day or night or whatever. And when Gerald got to the Gander airport, he started asking around.
SPEAKER_13: I asked the security there, you know, what was going on, and they said Fidel Castro is here.
SPEAKER_15: And I said, what? Fidel Castro was there in the airport, and he was more or less just hanging out.
SPEAKER_16: I had dinner with him.
SPEAKER_15: In the dining room, naturally. He had on his traditional fatigues and his combat boots.
SPEAKER_06: Green fatigues, no medals or nothing, just plain uniform. Turned out Castro had a pretty long layover in Gander, so at some point he basically says,
SPEAKER_13: give me a tour of your town. He wanted to see the town.
SPEAKER_15: So Ian and Gerald and Fidel Castro all pile in some cars and go driving around the little town
SPEAKER_16: until they come across a kid sledding. There was a young fellow with his dog and probably another friend there,
SPEAKER_06: and they were taking turns going down on their toboggan. Of course, Mr. Castro decided that that looked interesting and figured he might see what the thing was and how it worked, not being that familiar with snow. Castro gets on this sled and starts down the hill, and Ian Blackmore snaps a picture.
SPEAKER_06: I got ahead of him before he started on the slide down, so I was in a position to catch him on his way down and, well, photograph him. I didn't catch him.
SPEAKER_16: Ian Blackmore's photograph of Fidel Castro sledding would end up in Time magazine.
SPEAKER_13: And the amazing thing about this anecdote isn't how unique it was for Gander, but how totally normal. The Gander airport was used to hosting really famous people from all over the world. It wasn't just some tiny airport in some tiny town. It was a very large, very important airport in some tiny town.
SPEAKER_16: But before we hear how this place came to be,
SPEAKER_13: I want to take you inside the airport, because it's an incredible building. Okay, we're here in the Gander airport.
SPEAKER_16: The Gander airport is such a mid-century modern time capsule that I actually think I have to bring up some lounge music right now. This place is straight out of an episode of Mad Men. You know, Mad Men with Newfoundlander accents. If you follow me across here, over on the—
SPEAKER_05: Jerry Cram is a commissionaire at the Gander airport.
SPEAKER_13: The job is part fixer, part security guard. Jerry will probably be the one to give you a tour, if you ask. The terrace flooring is all from Italy.
SPEAKER_05: Right here is what we call the Birds of Welcome. Jerry is pointing at a bronze sculpture of seven birds
SPEAKER_13: that greets you when you walk into the lounge. The blue and the gray furniture is all from the late 50s, early 60s.
SPEAKER_05: The international lounge of the Gander airport
SPEAKER_13: is this big, airy space, super high ceilings, and when you walk in, you're immediately awash in the orangey glow of the 1950s. The vinyl chairs and couches are arranged in U-shaped seating areas. They were designed by famous mid-century designers like Charles and Ray Eames and Robin Bush.
SPEAKER_16: The Gander International Lounge has been called the single most important modernist room in Canada.
SPEAKER_13: Even the bathrooms are their own amazing time capsule, the women's restroom especially. Jerry calls out a warning so that we can go in. Mail guard!
SPEAKER_05: Ah, we're good to go. This is not a gross airport bathroom.
SPEAKER_13: It's beautiful mid-century luxury. There's a row of swivel chairs in front of a counter and a wall-sized mirror. It has two showers because, yes, people used to shower at the airport. There is two showers in this room as well as in the men's,
SPEAKER_05: but now you can say you were in the washroom that the Queen peppered her nose in on June 19, 1959.
SPEAKER_16: When this international lounge of the Gander Airport opened in 1959, the Queen of England herself came for the opening. And, yeah, the townspeople popped knob with her, too.
SPEAKER_13: A lot has happened in this airport, and the story of how it came to be and what it's become is really also a story about the history of air travel. Why Newfoundland? Because it's the shortest way.
SPEAKER_12: Come here, let me show you. You've got to look at it on a globe. If you trace a direct course from New York to Paris, you'll see that it takes you right over Newfoundland. Remember, Lindbergh went this way, and he didn't have any gas.
SPEAKER_16: In the 1920s, before Gander existed, Newfoundland's grassy fields were the jumping-off points for transatlantic daredevil pilots. Amelia Earhart, Alcock and Brown, Lindbergh, all of them. Because it was so far east, it made sense to start there if you were worried about getting across the Atlantic with enough fuel. Eventually, the British government, which controlled Newfoundland at the time, started to take note. Maybe there was something to this whole air travel thing. In 1936, the British chose what was then basically a patch of woods
SPEAKER_13: on the eastern side of Newfoundland as the site for over a million square yards of runways. By the spring of 1938, the Gander Airport was fully operational
SPEAKER_16: but the massive runways were mostly unused. There just weren't enough planes in operation that could actually survive the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. It was a very, very risky journey. In the two decades before the war, only 100 planes had crossed the Atlantic. 50 others had tried and failed. 40 people had died.
SPEAKER_13: Then in 1939, World War II began in Europe, and Allied forces wanted as many fighter planes as they could get their hands on. Americans and Canadians had been shipping planes over by boat,
SPEAKER_16: but that wasn't working out so well. They were being torpedoed by German submarines and whatnot,
SPEAKER_07: so they were losing more airplanes than were actually making it over to the UK.
SPEAKER_13: That's historian and former air dispatcher Dean Call. And he says to get planes to the UK, the British had to come up with a new idea. They would have to put what we call a bladder inside.
SPEAKER_07: It was a spare fuel tank, basically, to give them enough fuel to make the crossing.
SPEAKER_16: The process of flying the planes from Gander to Scotland began in 1940 and was called the Ferry Command. The first crossing was seven planes,
SPEAKER_13: and it took place on a freezing night in November. The pilots had to fly in the dark because lights could alert the Germans. Miraculously, all seven made it.
SPEAKER_16: But that was just the first day. Over the course of the war, 20,000 planes were brought to Gander to be flown across the Atlantic for the war. Some days there would be 100 airplanes that would go over,
SPEAKER_07: and Churchill was even quoted at one point. He referred to Gander as the largest aircraft carrier in the North Atlantic. I guess it was the turning point of the war, really, for Britain.
SPEAKER_13: Gander was making history, even though at the time there was no actual town of Gander. There was no town, say.
SPEAKER_10: There were people living between intersections of runways, and that's where the Americans and the Canadians and the British had built wartime buildings. Frank Deboe is a former air traffic controller
SPEAKER_13: at Gander and historian of the airport. And he says the early town of Gander was basically just a few living quarters right next to the runways.
SPEAKER_10: I would say, you know, 100 yards or so, or even closer than that. And they made a hell of a lot of noise, those aircraft. Because the Gander airport started as a military operation,
SPEAKER_16: it wasn't until the war was over and civilian air travel began that they decided to build a separate town away from the runways.
SPEAKER_13: And then, in the late 1950s, the Canadian government built that fancy international lounge at the airport. In 1958, just a year before the new lounge opened,
SPEAKER_16: jets like the de Havilland Comet and the DC-8 were introduced. These planes could make the long trek across the Atlantic without having to stop and refuel in Gander. But they took a while to go mainstream, and for years, Gander served as a stopping place for international travel.
SPEAKER_13: These were the glory days of Gander, when celebrities from all over the world would wind up stopping through on their way to or from the States. The Beatles' first step in North America wasn't in New York. It was in Gander, Newfoundland.
SPEAKER_16: The Gander airport became by far the hottest place to be in Gander. Oh yeah, you used to go up and hang around up there
SPEAKER_11: and watch the people coming in on the planes, and you know, who was there, and ride on the escalator. It was a hot spot for fun. John Baird grew up in Gander.
SPEAKER_13: You know, everything revolved around the airport.
SPEAKER_11: I mean, that was one industry town. It was a lot quieter place than it was then.
SPEAKER_16: In the 1960s, air travel was still pretty exclusive. A lot of North American tourists still traveled to Europe by ship.
SPEAKER_13: But celebrities and heads of state from all over the world were paying big bucks to fly, and many of them were stopping in Gander in that beautiful mid-century modern lounge.
SPEAKER_16: A lot of famous people who came through the Gander airport tried to go unnoticed, but some really wanted a cocktail from the bar. And if they were in the airport bar, they probably were interacting with the people of Gander. Security was pretty loose back then, to say the least.
SPEAKER_15: I met Marilyn Monroe. What was that like? Oh, I go back and do it again.
SPEAKER_07: Bob Hope and kings and queens of various countries. King of Jordan, King of Saudi Arabia. Mikhail Gorbachev. Macho Man, Randy Savage.
SPEAKER_05: I met President Bush.
SPEAKER_13: That's the former mayor of Gander, Claude Elliott. I met the Queen of England.
SPEAKER_04: I flew with Prince Philip on his chopper.
SPEAKER_13: The locals also loved to tell a story about Frank Sinatra trying to cut in line at the airport bar and getting told to go to the back. But as time went on, the lounge wasn't just a scene of people drinking cocktails on their way to London. By the late 1960s, most commercial jets could make it
SPEAKER_16: across the Atlantic without needing to refuel. But Gander was still serving an important role in international travel, especially to communist countries who couldn't fly to the U.S. or use its airspace. Gander was the major stopping point between Moscow and Havana, but this occasionally invited defectors seeking asylum in Canada.
SPEAKER_03: And in particular, there was a fair number from Cuba.
SPEAKER_13: That's Gary Vokey, Gerald Vokey's son. And he says sometimes people would get off their plane coming from Cuba or Bulgaria or some other communist country and seek asylum. Not that this was easy.
SPEAKER_16: Vokey remembers witnessing one incident in particular in which a woman from a Cuban flight attempted to escape down the lounge escalator to Canadian authorities while the Cuban flight crew tried to stop her. They had the lady hold by her feet.
SPEAKER_03: The Canadians had her hold by her head and her arms, so she was upside down going up the escalator. And she had a dress on her. The dress was back over her head. It nearly turned violent. And it was, for me, I mean, even as a kid, it was one of the most iconic things I've ever seen.
SPEAKER_13: For residents of Gander, life was also about living alongside people from all over the world who worked for the airlines. Aeroflot, the Russian airliner, had over 150 crew and flight planners in Gander alone.
SPEAKER_03: Gander in its day was a lot more multicultural than probably some of the bigger cities in Canada. The Brits had people there. The Germans had people there. There was, you know, Canadian military. Cubans and Russians. Cubans and Russians. Everybody mingled. Everybody mingled.
SPEAKER_07: In particular, the Cubans were famous for buying bicycles and shipping them back to Cuba.
SPEAKER_16: The airport turned Gander into an amazingly diverse place. And beyond that, it was a portal from the town to the rest of the world. There are stories about local people with the right connections hopping on last minute flights to Cuba and Europe and New York City just by clearing it with the captain.
SPEAKER_13: And maybe it was all those trips to New York that prepared the people of Gander for September 11, 2001.
SPEAKER_01: As Matt just mentioned, we have a breaking news story to tell you about. Apparently, a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center here in New York City. It happened just a few moments ago, apparently. We have very little information. Stephanie, my wife, said she had the news on in the morning
SPEAKER_07: and she said, it looks like an airplane crashed in one of the buildings in New York.
SPEAKER_16: On the morning of September 11, an unprecedented decision was made to close all American airspace. Hundreds of flights were diverted to land at airports in Canada. I was only on about 10 minutes when the town manager called me
SPEAKER_04: and said, you better come in. We may be getting some planes.
SPEAKER_15: Center area near 113, will we go to Toronto? The area near 113, center and negative, you must now land at Gander and turn right heading 320.
SPEAKER_16: As the planes came in one by one, the people of Gander gathered outside the airport to watch.
SPEAKER_07: Well, it was quite remarkable actually because you would see airplanes, aircraft lights, miles and miles and miles in the distance, all lined up to land, right? So it was quite a remarkable scene.
SPEAKER_16: 38 planes and nearly 7,000 passengers ended up in Gander. They called the stranded visitors the plane people. But the plane people weren't there just for a few hours. They were there for three days and they had nothing. The passengers weren't allowed to take their luggage, so they had arrived in Gander with nothing but the clothes on their backs. After each passenger was registered with the Red Cross,
SPEAKER_13: a loose network of volunteers from Gander and nearby communities provided thousands of hot meals, toiletries and prescriptions to the plane people. Bus drivers who were on strike came back to work to drive them around town. It was a job Gander was born to do. And our job here, our people came through and said,
SPEAKER_04: we're here, we're here to help you until you're ready to leave. Gander had 500 hotel rooms and 7,000 new guests.
SPEAKER_16: The population of the little town had nearly doubled over the last year. And so the residents stepped up and took people in. And yes, there was people who took people into their homes.
SPEAKER_04: Even though we were told not to do that because at that time, they didn't know how widespread that this terrorist attack would be. So this is the fullest question. Do they have enough food? Oh God, nobody runs out of food in Newfoundland. Some of the stranded passengers ended up forming strong bonds with their hosts.
SPEAKER_16: At least one marriage is reported. And a bunch of friendships. One group of plane people who stayed at a high school started a scholarship for it that's now worth over a million dollars. The passengers organized all this on their flight home after they finally got cleared to leave Gander. Even today, we still have people come back, visit people in people's homes that stayed here.
SPEAKER_04: We have people in Gander that goes to the US. This 9-11 story is sort of famous because of the Broadway musical,
SPEAKER_16: Come From Away, in which the Gander mayor claws the Elliott is a central character. And there's just five or six of us from the community that's portrayed in that play,
SPEAKER_04: but we represent this whole community. Is it a good likeness or? Well, he's not like me. I mean, I'm beautiful, Logan, but he's not like me. But for an American, he's done a pretty good job trying to imitate a Newfoundlander. It used to be one of the biggest airports in the world,
SPEAKER_02: and next to it is a town called Gander. Welcome to the rack if you come from away, you probably understand about half of what we say. They say no man's an island, but an island makes a man. Especially when one comes from one like Newfoundland. Welcome to the rack.
SPEAKER_16: These days, the Gander airport is pretty quiet. Do people, it's never quite as packed, I guess, as it once was.
SPEAKER_13: Uh, no.
SPEAKER_16: That's Luke and Jerry Cram inside the airport.
SPEAKER_05: We still get international traffic today, but nowhere near the extent. Before they had to stop somewhere to refuel, but now you got the planes that can go on without having to stop. St. John's, the capital of Newfoundland, has the island's major international airport now.
SPEAKER_16: And aside from a few daily flights, Gander's traffic is mostly military planes and emergency landings. But between the military base, the air traffic control center, and the airport, Gander has found ways to stay afloat.
SPEAKER_13: A few years ago, the airport authority was thinking of tearing down the international lounge, and building something smaller and much, much uglier. But there was a huge outcry from architecture enthusiasts around the world. Full disclosure, I was one of them. In the end, thanks to organizing by people like Luke,
SPEAKER_16: the mid-century time capsule that is the international lounge was saved. And Jerry Cram promises it will stay that way.
SPEAKER_13: Mark your words.
SPEAKER_05: Mark my words, but I'm not always going to be around either, so.
SPEAKER_16: And so, as long as Jerry Cram is around, the international lounge stands as a kind of monument to a bygone era, when flying was luxurious, when you didn't have to take your shoes off to go through security, when actually there was no such thing as security, when the bar in your airport terminal was open to anyone, ticket or not. And if Sinatra cut in front of you in line, you'd just tell him, please. Wait your turn. What do those big numbers painted on airport runways really mean? Kurt Kohlstedt will decode them for you right after this. You can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design or click to get your social post colors on brand. Create brand templates to give anyone on your team a design head start. You can save time resizing social posts with Canva Magic Resize. If your company decides to rebrand, replace your logo and other brand imagery across all your designs in just a few clicks. If you're a designer, Canva will save you time on the repetitive tasks. And if you don't have a design resource at your fingertips, just design it yourself. With Canva, you don't need to be a designer to design visuals that stand out and stay on brand. Start designing today at Canva.com, the home for every brand. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence them. And the IRC aims to help the people around the world get to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. Chances are you're listening to 99% invisible on your phone, probably while you're on the go. Think of all that you do on your phone the moment you leave your front door, whether it's looking up directions, scrolling social media, or listening to your favorite podcast. It requires an amazing network. That's why you should switch to T-Mobile. T-Mobile covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else and helps keep you connected with 5G from the driveway to the highway and the miles in between. Because your phone should just work where you are, it's your lifeline to pretty much everything you didn't bring with you. So next time you head out, whether you're taking a trip or going to work or just running errands, remember T-Mobile has got you covered. Find out more at T-Mobile dot com slash network and switch to the network that covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else. Coverage is not available in some areas. See 5G details at T-Mobile dot com. So a few years back, the Oakland International Airport changed two of its runway numbers. 27 became 28 and 29 became 30. 99 PI's own Kurt Kohlstedt lives in beautiful downtown Oakland, California, and he is here to explain why it was really important that they make that change. First though, you have to understand how runway numbering works. Airports around the world use this universal system and it's based off Earth's magnetic north.
SPEAKER_14: So basically you figure out the magnetic compass direction of the runway up to 360 degrees and then you round that off to the nearest 10 and then drop the zero at the end and then you have your number. Okay, so you end up with the subnumbers 1 to 36 instead of 10 to 360.
SPEAKER_16: Right, that's it. And each runway has a complementary number too that goes in the other direction and that's of course 180 degrees different.
SPEAKER_14: So runway number 18 is the flip side of runway number 36 and so on and so forth. And if you see letters, that actually means there are multiple runways running parallel to each other. So L is for the left, R for the right, and if there's one in the middle, they use letter C for center.
SPEAKER_16: So by necessity, if it was 18L, the other side would read 36R. Yeah. Okay. Okay. That all makes sense. So it's not obvious to me why they'd use compass directions rather than just numbering them 1, 2, and 3.
SPEAKER_14: Well, even with all the high-tech stuff that guides flights these days, magnetic directions serve as a kind of backup system to help planes land in case something goes wrong. And they also make it easy for pilots on the ground to double check that their runway and compass align before they take off so they know they're in the right place doing the right thing. Right. So if all else fails, you can use a compass.
SPEAKER_16: But then it begs the question, why do the numbers ever change?
SPEAKER_14: That's the really crazy part. I knew that the planet's magnetic poles reversed every few hundred thousand years or so. But there are also these smaller but significant shifts going on constantly. And we tend to think of north in terms of true north, that stable point at the top of a globe or a map. But a compass reading of magnetic north differs from one place to the next, and it moves around all the time too, driven by the flows of the Earth's molten metal outer core. And when those cumulative changes are big enough, then the airports have to repaint their runways or the numbers don't make sense anymore.
SPEAKER_16: Right. And it can be a small amount of change, right? It could just be it goes from 0.4 to 0.6, and that tips it in the other direction.
SPEAKER_14: Right. Because it rounds, right.
SPEAKER_14: And these shifts happen even faster closer to the poles, so airports that are really far to the north or really far to the south actually have to make these changes more often. So scientists have to keep an eye on this for their own sake, because if they're traveling on a plane, they want to make sure these things are right.
SPEAKER_16: Right. They do. And it turns out it's a huge project. There are magnetic monitoring stations all around the world and satellites that also help keep track.
SPEAKER_14: And I was actually just talking to my dad about this. He's a geophysicist. And apparently the poles may also reverse entirely again soon, but it's hard to say. And when that happens, it could actually cause problems for the world's electrical grids, among other things, not to mention causing an entire repainting of airport codes. Right. That's the least of their problems. When you say soon, what do you mean by soon? Like, should I be prepping right now?
SPEAKER_16: Well, if you look at the historical record, we're actually overdue already, but it could still be thousands of years out. Soon in geological time can be pretty long in terms of human time.
SPEAKER_16: Okay. So buy your cans of soup is what you're saying. Yeah, just a couple cans. Well, it's good to know. Meanwhile, if you want to geek out with more about runway fonts and other flight related design details, you can find Kurt's article on our website. It's 99pi.org.
SPEAKER_16: 99% invisible was produced this week by Luke Quinton and senior producer Katie Mingle mix and tech production by Sharif, use of music by Sean Real. Delaney hall is the senior editor. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team is Emmett Fitzgerald, Avery, Truffleman, Taron, Mazza and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 K L W in San Francisco and produced on radio row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% invisible is part of radio topia from PRX, a collective of the best, most innovative shows in all of podcasting. We are supported by our listeners just like you. You can find 99% invisible and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99 pi org run Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But you're always welcome over at our place at 99 pi. .org.
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