Residents of Gander, Newfoundland and Labrador, volunteered on the night of Jan. 7, 2026, to drive about 200 passengers from two flights diverted from St. John’s to local hotels, after a Facebook post at 10:03 p.m. showed there were not enough taxis available.
A Facebook post at 10:03 p.m.
The two aircraft had taken off from Toronto and Montreal and were unable to land as scheduled in St. John’s because of the weather. They were diverted to Gander International Airport on Wednesday night, Jan. 7.
Jackie Freake, assistant manager at the Quality Hotel, said she received a call that evening saying the planes had been diverted and the people on board needed hotel rooms. Passengers were assigned rooms in four hotels in town, but there were only a few cabs on the road to carry them.
Freake posted in a local Facebook group that more than 100 people at the airport needed rides to their accommodations. The post was made at 10:03 p.m. local time.
She had not, she said, directly asked for drivers. The response was immediate. “I didn’t ask anybody to help or anything like that and boom, my phone lit up!” Freake said on Thursday, Jan. 8. “It was just, ‘Can we go get them, can we go get them?'”
All the stranded passengers were in their hotel rooms within an hour of her post, she said. Gander airport officials estimated about 200 passengers between the two planes.
Back again in the morning
The help did not end that night. On Thursday morning, volunteers lined up at hotels to drive passengers back to the airport. Freake said there were so many volunteer drivers at the Quality Hotel that morning that she had to turn some away. Her husband was among the fleet of volunteer drivers.
Colleen Edwards was among the cars lined up at Sinbad’s Hotel and Suites on Thursday morning. She had not seen Freake’s Facebook message in time to help on Wednesday night, but drove a couple from Ontario in one trip, and a woman and a man from St. John’s in another. On the way, at a passenger’s request, she stopped at a store so the woman could get a drink.
“It was no big deal,” Edwards said, noting she did not have to work until Thursday afternoon. “I’m glad I did it. I love chatting. I love saying, like, ‘Where are you from, and how do you feel about being stranded?'”
“The town just pulled together, God love ’em,” Freake said. “It was just overwhelming, how many people showed up.”
The same town, 25 years on
Gander made international news in September 2001, when residents sheltered and fed thousands of airline passengers stranded in the town for days after the attacks in the United States on Sept. 11 and the closure of North American airspace. That generosity was later chronicled in the Broadway musical Come From Away.
Edwards is a direct link between the two episodes. She had an infant when the planes arrived in Gander in 2001 and was part of a group of parents that donated baby supplies to passengers who needed them. Helping again in 2026, she said, was only natural.
Freake, for her part, resisted treating Gander’s response as unique. The overwhelming kindness, she added, was not only a Gander story.
“I really think that if you went in any small community in Newfoundland, this is what would happen,” she said.
Why Gander still gets the diversions
Gander’s airport has long served as a diversion point for flights crossing the Atlantic and for traffic bound for St. John’s when weather closes in on the Newfoundland capital. Its runways and location make it a practical alternate, but a diversion still lands a large number of people, at short notice and often late at night, in a town with four hotels and few taxis.
That gap between the airport’s capacity to receive aircraft and the town’s capacity to move people is exactly what the volunteers filled on Jan. 7. There was no formal program to activate. A hotel worker posted at 10:03 p.m., residents answered with their own cars, and by about 11 p.m. roughly 200 travellers were in hotel rooms instead of an airport terminal — and by morning, a second, unplanned shuttle was already waiting to take them back.
