In small coastal towns in Newfoundland, so remote they have their own time zone, lines of 747s and 767s have become tourist attractions and thousands of passengers have spent nights sleeping on church pews and in homes of strangers.
Some passengers stuck in U.S. airports rented cars, bought junkers and hired limousines and cabs that sometimes charged thousands of dollars for cross-country trips.
About one-quarter of the nation’s 458 airports remained closed Thursday, awaiting federal certification that they meet tough new security standards. The open airports had extremely limited service.
Only a trickle of flights went in and out of O’Hare International Airport, but there was no service at Midway Airport, even though it technically reopened.
Operations at both airports are expected to expand Friday but will still be far below normal.
In all, some 30,000 passengers on 247 flights heading for the United States were diverted to Canada, mainly to Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.
At St. John’s, the easternmost city in North America, the population of 100,000 increased by almost 5,000 passengers on 27 transatlantic aircraft forced to land there.
The sleepy Newfoundland town of Gander has a much larger airport. The town has about 6,600 residents, but 40 jets have dumped enough passengers to almost double the town’s population.
Ten planes landed in Deer Lake. And Happy Valley-Goose Bay has at least one jet as well.
“The sad thing is, there’s still not much moving,” said Loretta Fudge, the spokeswoman for the Salvation Army in Newfoundland and Labrador, which has provided help for thousands of stranded passengers. “Somebody told me there was one flight that left. The rest are still here.”
In St. John’s, a 16-hour ferry ride from the mainland, many of the passengers have passed the time since Tuesday watching the news on TV.
Homeward flight disrupted
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Among them were Lori and Dan Greiner, Chicagoans who had been in Paris on business and were flying home Tuesday on United Flight 943. The couple sat in front of the pilot’s wife and behind Lynn and Don Magnuson, a Deerfield couple who had been celebrating their 10th anniversary in Italy and Paris.
About six hours into the trip, the plane banked to the right. The pilot said U.S. airspace had been closed and the plane was going to Newfoundland.
People started talking and speculating. A storm? Radar problems? Nuclear war? Dan Greiner grabbed the airplane phone and called his wife’s brother in Chicago. Greiner relayed the news as he heard it: The World Trade Center, the Pentagon, Pennsylvania. Flight attendants and passengers gathered around. It didn’t seem real.
For hours, the thousands of passengers diverted to St. John’s were kept on board their aircraft because authorities didn’t know what might be on the planes. Some planes ran out of water and food, and on several planes, passengers didn’t know what had forced them to land.
“We didn’t share it with them,” said Paul Snow, the provincial development director with the Salvation Army. “It wasn’t our responsibility.”
Eventually, the passengers were allowed to leave their planes and were bused to a local hockey stadium, where giant TVs that hang over the hockey rink played a local news station and CNN. For the first time, people saw what happened.
“I don’t know if there’s ever been a term or a word yet that could properly cover the mood,” Snow said. “It wasn’t chaos. It wasn’t pandemonium. Everyone was just upset. People were holding each other, people were crying. People were just awestruck in grief. Everyone was staring at the TV. Everyone was looking at what had happened. And it just kept repeating, over and over and over again.”
The Greiners and the Magnusons and some 250 people from their flight sat in section 118 of the stadium, wrapped blankets around themselves and just stared. Lori Greiner worried about her sister, who works in the World Trade Center and was there when it was bombed in 1993.
“I’ve heard she’s OK,” Lori Greiner said. “That she was actually right beneath the building, seeing people jump out the windows.”
Most of the people from their flight were sent to the Salvation Army Citadel.
The passengers passed around an envelope Wednesday and collected $1,000 for the Salvation Army. They say they are overwhelmed by the generosity of people–by the little girl who donated her sleeping bag, by the lines of local residents who gave towels, soap, food.
`Shock and horror and unity’
During the days, they watch TV in the cafeteria, mostly. They make phone calls to loved ones. They wait for news, for when they might be able to go home.
“Everybody has the same feeling of shock and horror and unity,” Dan Greiner said. “Now it’s to the point where we want to get home. We feel we should be there.”
Thousands of other U.S.-bound passengers were scattered across the globe, including Republican state Rep. Angelo “Skip” Saviano of Elmwood Park, who was on vacation in China.
The emergency also has grounded many passengers trying to get out of the country. Howard Baker, the former U.S. Senate minority leader who is now the ambassador to Japan, was stranded in Chicago with his wife, Nancy Kassebaum Baker, a former Republican senator from Kansas.
“It’s really frustrating,” Baker said. “There are very important things going on not only in this country, but at the embassy in Japan, and I need to be there. I just need to be there. I don’t need to be in a hotel.”
Besides the thousands of people stranded in the wrong country, thousands were forced to land in the wrong American city. Many of these people decided not to wait for flights.
Chicago co-workers David D’Onofrio and Dave Sonders, stranded in Louisville, paid $800 to rent a limousine.
John Park and four other Los Angeles colleagues, stranded in Chicago, paid $3,000 to take a Checker taxi back home. On the way back from dropping the group in L.A., driver Yogi Ward was expected to pick up a United flight attendant stranded in Las Vegas who needed a lift back to Chicago.
Park said he and his companions rationalized the expense by toting up what they thought it would cost them to pay for hotel rooms.
Carey Cooper of Highland Park met a stranger on his plane, which set down in Salt Lake City. The two men and another couple rented a car to drive back to Chicago.
“Quite frankly, a tragedy like this brings people together,” Cooper said. “You look for human contact.”