Operation Babylift: Vietnamese Orphan Extraction of 1975

When the central Vietnamese city of Da Nang fell to the Viet Cong in March of 1975, the South Vietnamese capital Saigon was slowly collapsing under near-constant shelling from the encroaching communist forces. In response, U.S. President Gerald Ford announced that the U.S. government would begin evacuating orphans from Saigon on a series of 30 planned flights aboard military cargo aircraft operated by the 62nd Airlift Wing of the United States Air Force.

Child services organizations joined forces with the U.S. military to airlift more than 3,300 babies out of Vietnam. They delivered orphans into the waiting arms of couples in the West, at the same time cementing the record for the largest act of adoption in known human history.

Operation Babylift Crash

For a divided nation mired in persistent tragedy, Operation Babylift proved to be more of the same, when the first C-5A cargo plane left Tan Son Nhut Airport shortly after 4:00 PM on April the 4th, 1975. Twelve minutes into the flight, there was an explosion that tore the lower rear fuselage apart, causing the loading ramp door to open and separate. A rapid decompression followed, along with trim, rudder and elevator cable separation, which turned the doomed plane into a flying brick.

Spilling altitude as they turned back for Ton Son Nhut, when the pilots realized they wouldn’t make the runway, they applied full power to bring the nose up, belly landing in a rice paddy before skidding a quarter mile, bouncing airborne again for an additional half mile before crashing into a dike. Of the 300 people on board, 138 were killed in the crash, including 78 babies and 35 military personnel.

When American businessman Robert Macauley learned that it would take more than a week to evacuate the remaining orphans due to the lack of military transport planes, he chartered a Boeing 747 from World Airways and arranged for 300 more orphans to leave the country, paying for the trip by mortgaging his home.

Operation Babylift flights would continue until artillery attacks by Viet Cong military units closing in on Tan Son Nhut Airport made additional flights impossible. By the Fall of Saigon on April 30th, 1975, Operation Babylift, along with Operation New Life, witnessed the successful evacuation of over 110,000 at-risk refugees from South Vietnam.