Bass with the mayor of Gander, Claude Elliott
(Beverley Bass/American Airlines)Meanwhile, the aircrafts were grounded. Including the flight time from Paris, Bass and her passengers were
trapped in their plane for more than a full day and night. The song “28 Hours/Wherever We Are” vividly
describes the passengers going stir crazy confined to their cages.
Bass, however, remembers the atmosphere as “really quite good”, and the few cellphones they had helped
to disseminate news among the passengers. “They actually knew more than I did,” she said. “The only radio
wave reception we could get was from the BBC, so we were getting your version of what was happening in
the US.”
But many of the passengers spoke no English and most couldn’t even comprehend what was happening
even if they did. It would be almost a day before they would reach a television and see what the rest of the
world had been watching on loop. It was then that Bass learnt the fate of Charles Burlingame, the pilot of
American Airlines 77 that was crashed into the Pentagon. She had only just seen him at a pub in London.
At 7.30am, 12 September, Bass, her crew and her passengers were allowed off the plane to be registered by
the Red Cross. Every stove in Gander had been on all night. They had cooked enough food to feed 7,000
people. “It was at that moment,” Bass says, “that we realised we had landed in the most unique place in the
world. And that’s how it continued throughout our stay.”
Jungle Jim’s, where Bass ate every meal for five
days (Beverley Bass/American Airlines)The rest of Come from Away describes how the locals embraced the “plane people”, helping them come to
terms with what happened and dealing with the logistics of the community’s population almost doubling
overnight. Two passengers on Bass’s flight, Nick from England and Diane from Texas, started to develop a
romance. On their last night, the passengers gather in a bar and are initiated as honorary