HOF096: Joyce Ernyes

Air Canada’s Vancouver based crews were assigned to airlift Vietnamese refugees from various points in South-East Asia to major Canadian cities in 1979-1980. This refugee resettlement program would become one of Canada’s largest, bringing over fifty thousand Vietnamese, subsequently known as “The Boat People,” to our country.

Joyce Ernyes was one of the crew members who worked the flights on a regular basis from Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Bangkok. She and her fellow crew members have fond memories of the Vietnamese people they met so long ago. Several flight attendants have written, and posted on line, their recollections of meeting these remarkable people who escaped from their homelands, ravaged by war, in the hope of starting a new life in a new country.