MONTREAL – Calin Rovinescu was strolling through an art museum in Barcelona on a wedding anniversary getaway when he heard the news.
In a pair of phone calls, his assistant told him planes had just struck the twin towers in New York City.
“I was looking at Picasso’s unique, surrealistic art … as I was hearing a surrealistic story,” Air Canada’s then-executive vice-president recalled.
Rovinescu, who would go on to become CEO, remembers scrambling to find a quiet place to dial into an emergency meeting of Air Canada executives, rushing into the street and through the doors of a café.
“The world was changing before my eyes, and the people around me had no clue what was about to happen,” he said.
The attacks and the plunge in air travel that followed forced a frenzy of tough choices among aviation and government leaders in the days and weeks afterward, as Sept. 11 pushed some airlines to the brink and beyond, reshaping Canada’s aviation landscape.
Leading the call with Rovinescu was then-chief executive Robert Milton, who had just woken up from a nap in London after catching a redeye flight from Montreal.
Receiving special clearance from the Canadian, U.S. and U.K. governments, Milton managed to fly back to Canada the day after the tragedy alongside Rovinescu, who’d hopped over to London from Spain. European airspace remained open.
“I remember being on the flight deck with the crew,” Milton said of the voyage, taken in a Bombardier Challenger business jet loaned last-minute by that company’s CEO. Air Canada’s 300-plus planes were grounded.
“It was truly eerie because there was no radio communication at all, whereas normally there’d be an armada of aircraft crossing the Atlantic in both directions. The chatter was non-existent.”
Marie-Hélène Lévesque, special assistant to transport minister David Collenette at the time, drove back to Ottawa from Montreal the morning of Sept. 11 with her boss. They had ducked out of an airport conference, where his speech was interrupted by the jangle of cellphones in the audience as executives got word of the unfolding disaster.
“In that minivan, all the major decisions were taken,” said Lévesque, now director general of the Public Health Agency of Canada.
Following the lead of American authorities, Collenette greenlit the closure of Canada’s airspace minutes after a Boeing 757 crashed into the U.S. Pentagon at 9:37 a.m. It marked the first time ever that either country had taken such a step.
“This was the third plane, and we didn’t know how many more there were,” said then-deputy minister Margaret Bloodworth.
Before the battery died on his cell, Collenette instructed Nav Canada to order 270 planes over the Atlantic Ocean to turn around and fly back to Europe. He also oversaw the landing of 224 other diverted flights carrying 33,000 passengers to 17 Canadian airports in a matter of hours, the most extensive aircraft grounding in the country’s history.
In Gander, N.L., the airport took on 38 planes carrying 6,500 people. The hardiness and hospitality of the town’s 9,000-plus residents became known to the world via the Broadway hit musical “Come From Away,” which chronicled their experience hosting the stranded travellers.
“Some of them sat for 24 hours because we weren’t ready to let them off the planes until we had enough customs and immigration people there to screen them. We didn’t know who was on them,” said Bloodworth.
“They didn’t know until they landed what had happened because it was not the days where you could have the internet from planes,” she added. “And the pilots by and large did not tell passengers until they landed, because there’s no point in panicking people.”
In the weeks and months that followed, politicians and bureaucrats allocated billions of dollars for new security measures and the creation of the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, which took charge of passenger screening processes that until then had been in the hands of individual airlines. An eventual gauntlet of checkpoints and protocols — shoes off, laptops out, liquids limited to 100 millilitres — signalled a permanent shift in how travellers fly.
Meanwhile, airlines struggled to absorb the blow of plummeting demand.
A majority of Air Canada revenues stemmed from flights to and from the United States, including routes where Canada was a layover point for overseas trips, Milton said. The plunge in air travel demand in the post-9/11 months severely dented earnings.
Air Canada cut 6,600 workers and posted a $1.25-billion loss in 2001 after losing hundreds of millions of dollars in sales in the fourth quarter alone. The US$15 billion in grants and loan guarantees that American rivals received didn’t help, as Canadian carriers received relatively little in financial aid — about C$160 million.
“When so much of your revenues are generated in the U.S market and your competition receives so much subsidization, you’re going to be destabilized. And we were destabilized,” Milton said.
The country’s second-largest airline, discount carrier Canada 3000, soon folded. It was placed in bankruptcy in November 2001. Numerous airlines across the globe met a similar fate, ranging from Ansett Australia to Swiss Air. Others restructured under bankruptcy protection in the decade that followed, including almost every U.S. legacy carrier and, in 2003, Air Canada.
“It led to a big, big restructuring. It highlighted the fragility of the cost structure,” said Rovinescu.
“The events of 9/11 lasted a long time.”
Though painful, Air Canada’s 18-month restructuring — brought on by the decline in travel sparked by the attacks and the SARS epidemic in 2002-03 — allowed it to wipe out $13 billion in debt, much of it incurred from its acquisition of Canadian Airlines in 2000. It also reached aggressive cost-cutting deals with more than a half-dozen labour unions, pared down its regional jet fleet and focused on higher-margin international routes — a strategy that continues to this day.
Air Canada’s bankruptcy protection process and the disappearance of Canadian Airlines and Canada 3000 paved the runway for Calgary-based WestJet to beef up its domestic network and grow into the country’s second-biggest carrier.
“It allowed WestJet to flourish … without having to worry about a lot of competition pushing them around,” said John Gradek, who teaches aviation management at McGill University. “And 9/11 put carriers that were on the on the edge of financial performance out of business.”
For all the vulnerability and financial brittleness that Sept. 11 revealed, it also showcased an underlying perseverance, said Rovinescu, who sees parallels with the COVID-19 pandemic’s hit to the travel industry.
“COVID was in some respects worse because of the duration of it and the unpredictability as to when it would end. Whereas 9/11 was more of a controlled environment — we knew the … closure was for a certain number of days,” he said.
“But the takeaway was, this is a resilient industry.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 8, 2026.
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