Rich McCabe

Delta Flight 15 takes off from Frankfurt at dawn. On board: 218 passengers. Families. Business travelers. A pregnant woman. Shirley Brooks-Jones, 65 years old, heading home to Columbus, Ohio. Five hours into the flight, a note reaches the cockpit. All U.S. airspace is closed. Land immediately. The captain says nothing about why. He tells passengers it's a minor instrument problem. Privately, the crew already knows about the World Trade Center. Gander International Airport. Newfoundland, Canada. Midday. The plane touches down 400 miles off its route. Out the window, passengers count 38 other jumbo jets already parked on the tarmac. By nightfall, 53 international flights sit grounded here. Nearly 6,600 people are stuck, with nowhere to go. Nobody is allowed off. For 28 hours, 218 people sit inside that plane. No real answers. No word on what's happening back home. Here's what makes it worse: most of them don't yet know if their own families are safe. Word finally spreads through the cabin. Two hijacked planes. The towers. The Pentagon. A field in Pennsylvania. The plane goes silent. Gander. Day two. Passengers finally step off the aircraft. They're bused 45 kilometers to a town called Lewisporte. Population: just over 3,300 people. Lewisporte has no idea 218 strangers are about to double its guest capacity overnight. It doesn't matter. The mayor puts out one call for bedding and food. The whole town answers. Schools close. Churches open. The Lions Club clears its hall and sets up cots by hand. High schoolers skip class to serve meals and translate for confused travelers. The pregnant passenger is placed in a home across the street from urgent care. Elderly passengers are welcomed into private houses, not shelters. Phone lines are opened for free, unlimited, day and night. When passengers try to pay shopkeepers back, the answer is always no. Nobody in Lewisporte will take a dollar. Local volunteers even bring out screech, the region's famous rum, and host a mock "screeching-in" ceremony to make the exhausted travelers laugh. For three days, this town of fishermen and loggers cares for people it has never met and will likely never see again. Brooks-Jones later calls it something simple. She says: "the most beautiful experience I have ever had in my life." Gander Airport. Three days later. Departure. Flight 15 is finally cleared to fly home. Before takeoff, Brooks-Jones asks the captain for one thing: permission to speak on the intercom. He hands her the microphone. She reminds everyone what Lewisporte just did for them. Then she asks for something back. Pledge sheets start moving up the aisle. Business travelers write checks. Strangers pass around pens. By the time wheels touch down in Atlanta, passengers have pledged $15,000. Brooks-Jones doesn't stop there. Back in Columbus, she calls the Columbus Foundation. An anonymous donor hears the story and matches it instantly, doubling it to $30,000. In 2002, the fund gets a name: the Lewisporte Area Flight 15 Scholarship Fund. It's built for one purpose. Send local kids to college. More than two decades later. The fund is still active. It has sent more than 300 students from the Lewisporte area to college and trade school. Doctors. Nurses. Engineers. Teachers. Some of them weren't born yet when Flight 15 landed. Brooks-Jones has flown back to Newfoundland more than two dozen times since 2001. She still shows up for graduation ceremonies. The friendships that started on cots in a high school gym are still going, more than 20 years on. Most people who know this story didn't hear it from a history book. They heard it from a Broadway stage. Lewisporte and Gander's kindness became a musical called "Come From Away." It has since played in cities across the world. Few people watching that show realize the scholarship fund behind it is still cutting checks to real students, every single year.