25 Years After 9/11, Operation Yellow Ribbon Has a Message the World Needs Again

Standing on the tarmac at Gander International Airport (YQX), it is difficult to reconcile the quiet expanse of the North Atlantic sky with the global panic that filled it a quarter of a century ago.

Twenty-five years ago, when the United States suffered an unfathomable tragedy, the response from this side of the border was an immediate, instinctual opening of doors.

Bus drivers paused labour strikes to ferry frightened passengers from grounded aircraft to safety. Pharmacies filled critical prescriptions for free. Families handed their keys to total strangers and said, “Our home is yours.”

TravelPulse Canada travelled to Gander, Newfoundland, to witness the reunion of Central Newfoundland and its “plane people.”

Today marks the 25th anniversary of Operation Yellow Ribbon, the day Canada welcomed more than 33,000 stranded international travellers across 17 airports.

 

 

Here in Gander, a town of just under 10,000 people in 2001, 38 wide-body jetliners landed in a matter of hours, instantly doubling the local population.

Claude Elliott, who was mayor of Gander on September 11, 2001, can still see the passengers' faces as they began coming off the planes.

“You could see the fright, the fear and the anxiety in their eyes,” Elliott recalled.

Five days later, he said, those faces looked entirely different.

“They saw kindness, generosity. Nobody asked any questions — what church they go to, who they voted for, nothing. They were taken in and treated like family.”

Everyday citizens looked at the sky and saw their neighbours in danger. In this narrative lies a gentle but powerful reminder that geopolitical rhetoric is temporary, but shared empathy is permanent.

To look back at that week from our current vantage point in 2026, it is easy to let the noise obscure the bedrock.

Governments can argue, and adjectives can be thrown across borders, but the foundational bond between neighbours survives temporary weather.

We Can Do Something

Oz Fudge, a municipal police officer in Gander at the time, remembers watching the aircraft stack up in the sky before landing at YQX.

“There was a great desire, a burning desire to help,” he said. “When I went up there, and I saw what was happening, it was a shock. But there was also a sense: We can do something. We're going to be able to help.”

There were thousands of unexpected guests. An international catastrophe was unfolding. A small town was suddenly responsible for feeding, housing and caring for them.

That's hospitality at its least glamorous and most meaningful.

Not just sandwiches and spare bedrooms.

Who needs insulin? Who needs medication? Who needs a doctor?

Who is frightened? Who needs somebody to sit beside them?

Who needs to hear, “We've got you”?

RELATED: 'God Love 'Em:' Gander Pulls Together to Aid Stranded Passengers - Again

Asked whether there was ever a moment when, as mayor, he looked at thousands of stranded passengers and wondered how the community could possibly do it, Elliott’s answer was immediate.

“Nope. Never.”

“The greatest resource that you have in your community is your people,” he said.

Kindness Had No Town Limits

And it wasn't only Gander.

Caring for 6,500 plane people quickly became a regional effort. Lewisporte, Appleton, Glenwood, Gambo, Norris Arm and communities across Central Newfoundland opened schools, churches, community halls and private homes to strangers.

Derm Flynn, who was mayor of nearby Appleton in 2001, remembers that nobody checked politics, religion or where the strangers arriving in their community came from.

They simply opened their doors.

Operation Yellow Ribbon was a national response.

But here the scale was intensely personal.

Strangers didn't remain strangers for very long.

Those stories would eventually inspire the hit musical Come From Away. But Michael Rubinoff, the show's original producer, is careful about how that history is remembered.

RELATED: From Stage to Shore: How 'Come From Away' Is Driving Tourism in Newfoundland

The story, he told an audience in Lewisporte this week, could never simply have been called Gander. Doing so would diminish the role other communities played in feeding, housing and caring for thousands of stranded passengers.

Twenty-five years later, Rubinoff believes responsibility for preserving that history is beginning to pass to another generation.

“As we get older, you're the caretakers of the story.”

Janice Goudie was 21 years old and had only recently arrived in Gander to work as a newspaper reporter when the world arrived with her. Her story also unfolds in the musical.

“I remember going out and sitting in the vehicle and just crying, and just bawling my eyes out and hoping nobody saw me because I was trying to be very, very professional,” she told TravelPulse Canada.

For Goudie, those five days would become part of a story she has now helped carry for a quarter-century.

Gander has held a 9/11 commemoration every year since. The annual event honours the nearly 3,000 people killed while also recognizing the unexpected bond forged in Gander.

This year, visitors are once again filling the town. Cory Abbott of Steele Hotels, which operates four Gander properties, told CBC News accommodations are “pretty much booked solid” for the commemoration.

Among the dignitaries expected to attend today’s ceremony are former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Tony Wakeham, Fisheries Minister Joanne Thompson and U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra.

RELATED: 9/11’s Lasting Impact on Travel

As Gander’s current Mayor Percy Farwell noted on this milestone anniversary, the raw humanity of what happened here “rises above the political discussions and all the other sabre rattling.”

The true character of the Canadian-American relationship can’t be found at a press conference. It’s defined by what happens when the world stops spinning.

Elliott remembers the town after the planes departed.

The town was exhausted but couldn't sleep.

“They didn't need us crying with them,” Elliott said. “We cried when they were gone, not when they were here.”

Then Came the Rain

Goudie remembers that while the passengers were stranded, Central Newfoundland was unusually sunny and warm.

Then they left.

“It poured, like poured out of the heavens,” she said. “It's like nature felt it, and it just released and burst.”

Empathy isn’t defined by borders.

In New York, Ken Shapiro, Senior Vice President/Content Director for Northstar Travel Group was living just a couple of blocks from the World Trade Center.

That morning, he was taking his nine-month-old son to daycare and was about to enter City Hall Park, at the base of the towers, when the first plane hit.

When the first tower collapsed, Shapiro and his son were back in their apartment, hoping their building wouldn't be taken down along with everything around them.

He decided to take his son to the apartment of a friend who lived a safer distance from the World Trade Center. He knew he could make most of the trip indoors, but there would be a few hundred yards they would have to cross outside in the dust and debris.

When they reached that point, Shapiro wrapped his son's face with his blanket and tried to move as fast as he could with the stroller.

But he got only a few steps before the blanket fell away from his son's face.

“Before I knew it, two figures appeared out of the dust cloud. They grabbed both sides of the stroller, and the three of us ran with it at full speed until we reached the indoor safety of my friend's building.”

Then they disappeared back into the dust.

“I never knew who they were, but that was the first instance I witnessed of a wave of kindness that took over the city that day,” Shapiro said.

He still remembers stores handing out water bottles to the throngs of people leaving Manhattan on foot over the Brooklyn Bridge, and homemade meals being brought to firehouses all over the city.

“When I look back on the horrors of that day, I'm also touched by the kindness strangers are capable of showing each other — starting with the two men who came out of the gray cloud and helped me keep my son safe.”

Today, a piece of steel from the World Trade Center rests inside Gander International Airport.

Elliott remembers the day New York firefighters brought it to Gander, escorting it on motorcycles up the same runway that had welcomed thousands of frightened passengers years earlier.

There is something fitting about where it came to rest: a piece of New York, entrusted to the town that once sheltered so many of its neighbours.

If Tomorrow Asked the Same of Us

For those of us in the travel and tourism industry, we often talk about hospitality as a metric — occupancy rates, seat capacities and economic margins.

Operation Yellow Ribbon reminds us that hospitality, at its core, can be something far more fundamental: the refusal to let a stranger remain a stranger when they are in trouble.

Asked whether it would be different if it happened today, Elliott told TravelPulse Canada that if 38 planes arrived in Gander right now, the community would take those passengers in and treat them the same way.

People may be more frustrated, he acknowledged, but “not to the point that they wouldn't help somebody.”

Fudge also rejects the suggestion that Canadians would respond differently if history somehow repeated itself tomorrow.

“The average person is as good as what they've always been.”

Goudie goes a step further.

She believes Canadians might actually meet frightened Americans with even greater empathy today.

“You're our neighbors. We know this isn't just you.”

The Story We Leave Behind

And perhaps that's the distinction worth remembering 25 years later.

History isn't just a museum exhibit; it's a guide for how we ought to treat each other right now, forged in the quiet spaces where one neighbour catches another who is falling.

Twenty-five years later, Goudie hopes the generation inheriting this story understands that its lesson isn't simply about what people did in 2001.

“I hope, if anything, we're going to teach the next generation to have the same empathy. And to stand up when a neighbour needs help,” she said. “I hope we don't lose. I hope we win.”

For Kevin Tuerff, whose experience inspired the character Kevin T. in Come From Away, winning might begin with something remarkably small.

While stranded in Newfoundland, Tuerff remembers offering gas money to strangers who drove him and his partner to Walmart.

They refused.

“No, no. You can do the same,” they said.

That small act helped inspire Pay It Forward 9/11, which encourages people to honour the day through acts of kindness.

Tuerff says rebuilding some of what existed in the days after September 11 can only happen one person at a time, by breaking down the silos that tell us kindness extends only to people in our own neighbourhood, political party or church.

And Tuerff had another message he wanted Canadians to hear.

“Despite what you hear in the news, Americans love Canadians.”

A Red and White Sign

For decades, Canadian children grew up with a tradition called the Block Parent program. A simple red-and-white sign in a front window told anyone who was lost, frightened or in distress that a safe refuge and a warm heart were waiting inside.

On that September morning, Canada didn't just coordinate a flight protocol.

On a national scale, we put out our red-and-white sign, offering safety and warmth to our neighbour until it was safe to go home.

We are neighbours, keepers of a shared horizon. And if the skies ever darken again, those doors will open just as wide.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, Operation Yellow Ribbon has a message the world needs again. It isn't simply, “Look how kind we were.” This is who we proved we could be. We have inherited a responsibility to make sure we don't lose it.

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