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    Brian Roemmele
    @BrianRoemmele
    The plane was full of babies in cardboard boxes. Then the door exploded… In April 1975, Saigon was falling. North Vietnamese tanks were 10 miles away. US President Gerald Ford ordered Operation Babylift to fly 3,300 Vietnamese orphans to America. The first flight was a giant C-5A Galaxy, the world’s biggest plane. On board were 314 people: 243 babies and children, many under 1, sick and malnourished. With no cribs, nurses placed them in cardboard boxes from the base exchange and strapped the boxes to the floor with cargo nets. Each held 2–3 babies. Twelve minutes after takeoff from Tan Son Nhut, at 23,000 feet, the rear cargo door blew off. Explosive decompression filled the plane with fog. Two flight attendants and 78 babies in the back were sucked out and died instantly. Pilot Captain Bud Traynor wrestled the crippled plane. He could not return to Saigon—it was too dangerous. He crash-landed in a rice paddy. The plane broke into four pieces. 138 died; 176 survived, including 149 babies found alive in the wreckage, still strapped in their boxes. The photo is from a second successful Babylift flight a day later. Those boxes are real. The nurses volunteered to fly into a war zone knowing the last plane had crashed. Many of those babies grew up in America and only 30 years later learned they had survived a crash that killed their friends. One survivor, Aryn Lockhart, was 2 months old in a box on that flight. Today she is a mother in Ohio.
    19:30 · 2026年8月1日7.8万再生数
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    Cat., 3D Maker & Designer
    @thepagangoddess
    8月1日
    I was there when the planes arrived at Clark AB, PI. We took busses to the end of the runway and picked up babies out of cardboard boxes while the aircraft were being refueled. A friend in high school lost her pilot father. It was a crazy, frenetic time, but the war was ending.
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    I Work For Food
    @AJJ1563
    8月1日
    There was follow up to this, the military planes were legit military targets, once it got dicey Pan Am Airways stepped up and flew in Pan Am Jets with Pam Am crews to get the last of the children out. It was a heroic task Pan Am accepted.

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XユーザーのBrian Roemmeleさん: 「The plane was full of babies in cardboard boxes. Then the door exploded… In April 1975, Saigon was falling. North Vietnamese tanks were 10 miles away. US President Gerald Ford ordered Operation Babylift to fly 3,300 Vietnamese orphans to America. The first flight was a giant C-5A Galaxy, the world’s biggest plane. On board were 314 people: 243 babies and children, many under 1, sick and malnourished. With no cribs, nurses placed them in cardboard boxes from the base exchange and strapped the boxes to the floor with cargo nets. Each held 2–3 babies. Twelve minutes after takeoff from Tan Son Nhut, at 23,000 feet, the rear cargo door blew off. Explosive decompression filled the plane with fog. Two flight attendants and 78 babies in the back were sucked out and died instantly. Pilot Captain Bud Traynor wrestled the crippled plane. He could not return to Saigon—it was too dangerous. He crash-landed in a rice paddy. The plane broke into four pieces. 138 died; 176 survived, including 149 babies found alive in the wreckage, still strapped in their boxes. The photo is from a second successful Babylift flight a day later. Those boxes are real. The nurses volunteered to fly into a war zone knowing the last plane had crashed. Many of those babies grew up in America and only 30 years later learned they had survived a crash that killed their friends. One survivor, Aryn Lockhart, was 2 months old in a box on that flight. Today she is a mother in Ohio.」 / X