Start with mathematics. You don’t need to know words like orthodromic or geodesics on an ellipsoid to understand how Gander fits into what’s known as the Great Circle Route. Moored out where it is in the Atlantic Ocean, Newfoundland is 1,500 kilometres closer to Europe than Montreal or New York is, which made it the most convenient place to land and refuel for transatlantic flights.

That’s why Newfoundland’s skies started filling up soon after the First World War. The first men to fly non-stop to Ireland, John Alcock and Arthur Brown, took off from St. John’s in 1919. In the 1920s, local newspapers teemed with news of pilots overhead in contraptions often preceded with the less-than-reassuring adjectival formulation heavier-than-air. In 1932, Amelia Earhart launched her historic solo flight across the Atlantic at Harbour Grace. A year later, Charles Lindbergh stopped by, scouting for likely airfields on behalf of Pan American World Airways.

As the 1930s progressed and aircraft technology developed, questions of influence and strategic advantage moved to the fore. Britain had commercial designs of its own, and the government was soon partnering with the private Imperial Airways to establish a worldwide aviation network. Newfoundland was at this time its own sovereign dominion and there are those who’ve argued that when Britain took back economic control the year of Lindbergh’s visit, air routes and landing fields played a large part in their calculations. Passenger service was a piece of the eventual plan, but more immediately there was mail to deliver, and cargo. The fact that officials weren’t talking openly about future military uses doesn’t mean that they weren’t top of mind, too.

Today, it’s not hard to drive right by Gander — the strip of hotels and Irvings and Ultramars fronting the highway is brief — but if you turn in, you’re soon in the thriving centre of town. Not far from the Fraser Mall, the drive-thru at the Tim Hortons abuts the Bank of Montreal, across from the Canadian Tire. Hockey nets lie next to pickup trucks in the driveways of the houses that line the streets named after famous international aviators. One of Gander’s prominent nicknames is Crossroads of the World, but at actual intersections in Gander — where Lindbergh meets Bishop, say — you could be anywhere in Canada. It was a different story in the early days. The war that broke out a year after the airport opened transformed the remote, new facility. By 1942, Gander was a hive of military activity, with as many as 10,000 personnel — Canadian, British, American — stationed there, along with fleets of bombers and transports, convoy escorts and U-boat hunters.

There was still no town when Frank Tibbo first passed through here in 1950: everybody who worked at the airport lived there, in barracks. The new town site was just starting to fill out in 1956, the year he came back to stay. That also happened to be the busiest year in the airport’s history, as Tibbo points out: even as Gander proper was ramping up to its heyday, the airport that put it there was already on the wane.

Tibbo was the one who showed me on the map how the original town plan traces the outline of a goose’s head — no one knows exactly whose idea that was — and it’s from his comprehensive local history that I know what they almost named Gander before they didn’t: Beaverwood, Airlandia.

It’s easy to immerse yourself in the rich lore of Gander’s milestones. First air crash: December 1940. First wedding: November 1941. First bomb scare: August 1957. Trespassers to have strayed into airport precincts: moose, a cat newly landed from Iraq, a polar bear. Not so easy to distil is a sense of what it’s like to live in Gander. Jamie Fitzpatrick is a St. John’s writer and broadcaster who grew up there through the 1970s and into the ’80s. “It was understood that the airport’s golden age had passed, but it still defined the town and its purpose,” he says. “It wasn’t quite a one-industry town, but close to it.”

Linked to the world beyond like no other place in Newfoundland, the town had a different spirit to go with its outlook. “Gander prided itself on being sophisticated and young, full of young families living large on the snazzy new industry of air travel,” Fitzpatrick says. “The town is older now, of course. But I think the idea that it’s a modern, youthful place still lingers.”

Part of this, Fitzpatrick says, involved a certain separation from the mainstream of Newfoundland history. “Someone’s granddad might take him out cod jigging when the family went out around the bay for a summer visit. But I never heard anyone express an interest in living on the ocean and eking a living from the fishery. Most of our parents would have viewed such a move as defeat.”

The airport business isn’t what it once was. It was in 1958, Frank Tibbo points out, that commercial jets began to dominate the skies. They didn’t need to refuel, and they weren’t diverting to Gander for the scenery. “The amount of landing traffic gradually decreased until there was practically none,” Tibbo says. “They were all flying over.” Pegging Gander’s existential worries that far back may be a little gloomy, but it does put its more recent struggles in perspective. In 2006, for instance, facing the burdens of a new federal airport act, the then-airport CEO mused about closing the whole show down. “If it has no worth to anyone,” he said, “then why are we beating a dead horse? Let it go.”

The Canadian government got out of running airports in the 1990s, which means that Gander is community-managed, on Ottawa’s behalf, under a long-term lease. “We’re essentially sink-orswim,” Reg Wright says. “So if we don’t make money at year-end, then we have to take remedial action to address that.” Airports are capital-intensive: an upgrade of one of Gander’s two runways can run to $10 million.