![]() What has helped since, she says like the proud groupie she is, has been Come From Away, which as of May, Bass had seen in performance 101 times. This did not happen.’ And then, after three months … I was OK. “But what did happen to me is for 90 nights I woke up in the middle of every night, hoping it wasn’t true,” she said. She did not have lingering anger issues that the terrorists had used the planes she loves as killing machines. ![]() And it never, ever affected me on any of my flights afterward.” “I was not going to let that event ruin what I have loved so much for my whole life. “I never once thought about not flying again,” she said. In the five days Bass was grounded in Gander, her Boeing 777 and others began to sink into runway asphalt that was never intended to bear so much weight. “You had to be qualified, or you weren’t going to be part of the group.” “They had 10,000 applications for pilots that year, and they hired 87,” she said. Until 1976, when Bass became the third female pilot ever hired by American Airlines. “Most of the time when women put applications in to the airlines, they were simply rejected,” she said. And my passion was to fly the biggest airplanes I could fly.”īut at the time, Bass had few role models. “I wasn’t part of the Gloria Steinem crowd. “I wasn’t part of the women’s movement,” she said. And she has.īeverley Bass was hired by American Airlines in 1976.Īt the time, Bass didn’t even know what a glass ceiling was. “When I came home from my first lesson, I walked into the house and told my parents I’ll fly for the rest of my life,” she said. So when she turned 18, she signed up for flying lessons herself. At 16, she begged her father to let her take flying lessons, but he wanted her to focus on the family horse trade. At eight, Bass’ aunt would take the girl out to the airport at night just to watch the landing lights. ![]() She has ever since she was four, when she saw a statue of Icarus But she does not consider herself a pioneer. The next month, she led the first all-female crew in the history of commercial jet aviation on a flight from Washington, D.C. Read more: Bass’ response to seeing her story come to life in Come From Awayīass, now 66 and retired, made history as the first female captain at American Airlines in October 1986, when she was 34. She and her husband, Tom, have been back five times, and they seriously considered moving there after they attended a massive 10-year reunion in 2011. One local veterinarian took charge of feeding the hundreds of animals that were locked away in airplane cargo holds.īass was the 36th of 38 pilots to land at Gander International Airport on September 11, 2001.īass does not consider herself a specifically religious person, but she considers Gander to be a holy place. Gander is a town with only 500 motel rooms, so residents took strangers back to their homes to shower. Local merchants cleared their shelves without taking inventory. They brought inhalers and insulin needles and anything else they thought might be needed. Because passengers were not allowed to access their luggage, Gander residents brought diapers and baby formula to the airport. The spontaneous relief effort was called Operation Yellow Ribbon. “The people of Gander had stayed up literally all night cooking. “I can still remember walking into the terminal and just seeing it lined with tables and tables of food,” Bass said. “It was just a very, very hard night,” she said.īut when they finally got off the plane at 7:30 the next morning, Gander revealed itself to be a kind of Brigadoon. Some, Bass said, must have assumed World War III had broken out. ![]() And because cell phones were not yet prevalent no one knew the full extent of what was happening in New York. Little did she know when she landed after eight hours in the air that no one would be allowed off the plane for another 19 hours because there was simply no place for them to go. “It is a celebration of the best in humankind,” she said.īass was the 36th of 38 pilots to land at Gander. ![]() The North American Tour of COME FROM AWAY, Photo Credit Matthew Murphy ![]()
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