Gander International Airport (YQX)

Gander was chosen for the construction of an airport in 1935 because it is very close to the great circle route between New York and London. Starting in the 1940s it was a refueling stop for transatlantic flights to Scotland, Ireland and beyond, and continued in this role through the early 1960s and in some cases into the 1990s. A few carriers at Gander during this era:

• Air France ran several services through Gander connecting Paris and Shannon to Montreal, Boston, and New York in the 1950s.
• American Overseas Airlines used Gander as a stop for Lockheed Constellation flights between New York and London from 1947.
• Interflug flights between East Germany and Cuba would stop to refuel in Gander until the airline began using Airbus A310s in 1989.

With the advent of jets with longer range in the 1960s, most flights no longer needed to refuel. Gander has decreased in importance, but it remains the home of Gander Control, one of the two air traffic controls (the other being Shanwick Oceanic Control in western Ireland) which direct the high-level airways of the North Atlantic. Most aircraft traveling to and from Europe or North America must talk to at least one of these air traffic controls.

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During the Cold War, Gander was notable for the number of persons from the former Warsaw Pact nations who defected there (including Soviet chess player and pianist Igor Vasilyevich Ivanov, Cuban Olympic swimmer Rafael Polinario,[27] and the Vietnamese woman famously photographed as a naked girl fleeing a napalmed village, Phan Thi Kim Phuc). It was one of the few refueling points where airplanes could stop en route from Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union to Cuba.

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In 1985, Gander was the site of the Arrow Air Flight 1285 disaster, in which a McDonnell Douglas DC-8 with 256 people on board crashed during takeoff probably due to atmospheric icing; there were no survivors. The crash was, and remains, as of March 2018, the deadliest airplane accident on Canadian soil.

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History

Construction of the airport began in 1936 and it was opened in 1938, with its first landing on January 11 of that year, by Captain Douglas Fraser flying a Fox Moth of Imperial Airways. Within a few years it had four runways and was the largest airport in the world. Its official name until 1949 was Newfoundland Airport.

In 1940, the operation of the Newfoundland Airport was assigned by the Dominion of Newfoundland to the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) and it was renamed RCAF Station Gander in 1941. The airfield was heavily used by RAF Ferry Command and Air Transport Command for transporting newly built aircraft across the Atlantic Ocean to the European Theatre, as well as for staging operational anti-submarine patrols dedicated to hunting U-boats in the northwest Atlantic. Thousands of aircraft flown by the United States Army Air Corps through the changeover to the United States Army Air Forces, and the RCAF destined for the European Theatre, travelled through Gander.

The Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) also established Naval Radio Station Gander at the airfield, using the station as a listening post to detect the transmissions and location of enemy submarines and warships.

Following the war, the RCAF handed operation of the airfield back to the dominion government in March 1946, although the RCN's radio station remained and the military role for the entire facility was upgraded through the Cold War. The Canadian federal government changed the name to Gander Airport after Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949. It opened the current passenger terminal in 1959.

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Future growth

Officials at Gander International Airport have stated that the future for the airport is grim unless the federal government provides funding to cover costs. Over 50% of all aircraft operating from the air field are military, and do not pay landing fees. However, domestic passenger traffic increased by over seven percent in 2006, while weekly cargo flights from Iceland show some promise of expansion.

In April 2014, Gander Airport Authority decided on plans to abandon the existing terminal building due to high operating costs and replace it with a new terminal a quarter of the size. The fate of the old building is uncertain. The terminal, which was built in the 1950s and has drawn continuing worldwide interest for its modernist design, has been recognized by other Canadian institutions as a valuable piece of heritage architecture and has many of its original furnishings and fixtures still intact.

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Photo credit to Zach Bonnell