April 1975, Saigon was falling.
The plane was literally full of babies in cardboard boxes. And then the door exploded.
April 1975, Saigon was falling. North Vietnamese tanks were 10 miles away. US President Gerald Ford ordered Operation Babylift - fly 3,300 Vietnamese orphans to America.
The first flight was
a giant C-5A Galaxy, the biggest plane in the world. On board were 314 people - 243 babies and
children, many under 1 year old, sick, malnourished. They had no cribs. They were placed in cardboard boxes from the
base exchange by nurses, who then used cargo nets to secure the boxes to the
floor. Each box had 2-3 babies.
12 minutes after
takeoff from Tan Son Nhut, at 23,000 feet, the rear cargo door blew off. Explosive decompression. Two flight attendants and 78 infants in the
back were sucked out and died instantly as the plane filled with fog. The
crippled aircraft was wrestled by Captain Bud Traynor, the pilot. He couldn't
go back to Saigon - too dangerous. He
crash-landed in a rice paddy. The plane
broke into 4 pieces. 138 died in total. 176 survived, including 149 babies
found alive in the wreckage, still strapped in their boxes.
The image you see is
from a second successful Babylift flight that took place the following day.
Those boxes are real. Those nurses
volunteered to fly into a war zone knowing the last plane crashed. Many of those babies grew up in America and
only 30 years later learned they survived a plane crash that killed their
friends.
One survivor, Aryn
Lockhart, was 2 months old in a box in that crash. Today she is a mother in Ohio.
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