SPEAKER_00 0:15

Welcome to the Pan Am Podcast, brought to you by the Pan Am Museum in Garden City, New York. This podcast and our museum are dedicated to celebrating the legacy of the world's most iconic airline, Pan American World Airways. If you're not familiar with Pan Am, welcome. We are honored to have you here, and for you to learn about what we're all about. If you already know of Pan Am, worked for, or flown on the airline, or just love our history, it's good to be with you again. So with that, let's get this episode in the air, so to speak. Welcome aboard your Pan American jet clipper. Our mission statement is to educate, celebrate, and inspire present and future generations by preserving historical and diverse personal stories of Pan American World Airways. Please visit our website for more information at the Pan Ammuseum.org. Again, our website is the Pan Ammuseum.org. You can also find us on Facebook and Instagram. We are also on Twitter. Follow us at Pan Am Museum. We would love to meet you when you visit our museum on Long Island, which is just a short distance away from New York City. In this extended episode, we will be joined by Alan Topping, a Pan Am employee who evacuated almost 500 people out of Saigon days before the city fell in 1975. But first, many of you were kind enough to send in comments and compliments about this podcast. It is greatly appreciated and thank you. As of this recording, the podcast has been downloaded almost 1,500 times and listened to in 48 countries since we went live over a week ago. We want to thank you for listening. Please feel free to share this podcast with people you might think would be interested in Pan Am and leave us a review on how we're doing. One of the frequent questions we've received is, who is the guy hosting the podcast? I suppose that's a fair question. I originally wanted to be incognito and be this nameless voice of the museum. However, I suppose it's time for a formal introduction. And yes, that's a Cleveland accent you hear. My name is Tom Betty, and I'm a historian and serve on the museum's board of directors. It's a pleasure to meet you. Our goal is to bring the history of Pan Am to life through creative storytelling and engaging interviews like what we're doing with this program. There are many stories of Pan Am yet to be told. Now to our interview. Al began his career with the Institute of International Education arranging travel for foreign exchange students. He then joined United Airlines in 1966 as a passenger service agent and was later promoted to service director, where Pan Am Recruiters took notice. He joined Pan Am in 1969 as a sales representative assigned to the San Francisco Sales Office. In November of 1972, he was promoted as Pan Am's Director of Vietnam and Cambodia based in Saigon, South Vietnam. After leaving Saigon in April of 1975, Al managed operations in various Pan Am stations overseas for the next eight years. He returned to the States in 1982 to be appointed assistant to the chairman for consumer affairs by Pan Am CEO Ed Acker. For the next nine years, Al held other executive management positions within the company, having risen to head of corporate communications when Pan Am ceased operations in December of 1991. After Pan Am, he worked for the Miami Dade School Board Administration, the Miami Herald, and the Mikasuke Golf and Country Club in Miami, Florida. Now fully retired and frequently enjoying his golf game, he lives with his wife Jan in Ocala, Florida. Al recently wrote a book about his incredible experience in Saigon called Wings of Freedom: A True Story. You can find a link in the episode description to purchase this book from the museum's online store. In 1990, NBC made a movie out of Al's story called Last Flight Out, starring James Earl Jones, Richard Krenna, and Rosalind Chow. A YouTube link to the full movie is also in the episode description. And with that, it is an incredible honor to welcome Al Topping.

SPEAKER_09 6:00

Thank you very much. I'm really happy to be here and look forward to uh sharing some of my expansive experiences with uh the audience.

SPEAKER_00 6:09

It's not every day I get to talk to someone who has had a movie made about them, and the actor playing them in that movie is none other than the great James Earl Jones. I'm sure you get that all the time.

SPEAKER_09 6:21

Yes, I do. Yes, I do.

SPEAKER_00 6:25

Why don't we go back to the beginning? Uh tell us about your first introduction to Pan American.

SPEAKER_09 6:31

Okay. Uh we're gonna go way back. Um, as a small boy growing up in Jamaica in Montigo Bay, I was only about six or seven years old at the time. And uh our family was immigrating to the United States, and this would be the first time that I would have seen an airplane, first time getting on an airplane, first time leaving Jamaica. And uh the day arrived, and we're at the airport in Kingston, and I could not believe the size of this airplane. Now we're talking about a DC-6 or DC-7 at the time, but it was huge, you know, as far as I could see. Um and then I thought, my goodness, how is this airplane going to get in the air? Because I'm watching them loading bags and cargo and whatever, and then all the people getting on the airplane. And um I found out many years later that my mother was terrified because she apparently between Jamaica and Miami, uh, we hit some turbulence, and that really got her attention. So all the years I worked for Pan Am, my mother never ever got on another airplane, even though she had the travel privileges and benefits for travel. But uh that was the first time um I was connected to Pan An, and little did I know at that time that some 30 odd years later, I would not only be working for Pan An, but uh getting on an airplane in Saigon with almost 500 people uh just before Saigon was taken over by the North Vietnamese, which was a totally different experience from Kingston to Miami, I could tell you that.

SPEAKER_00 8:28

Before we get to that story, um can you tell us a little bit about how you ended up in Saigon?

SPEAKER_09 8:34

Yeah, um in 19 in the 1970s, uh late 60s, uh Pan Am was going through a lot of organizational changes. And uh on my performance report that I would do once a year, I always indicated that my my long-term goal was to be a Pan Amp station manager. So in 1972, when we were going through a reorganization throughout the company, my boss in San Francisco asked me if I was still interested in becoming a Pan Amp station manager. And I said, Yes, I was. He said, Well, I'm uh I'm going to be stationed in Hong Kong, and I'm looking for some folks to fill up some slots in the Pacific Division. And if you're interested, I might have a station for you. And I said, Well, that'd be great. So my first thought when he said Pacific, I'm thinking of Hawaii, which was probably, and then I'm thinking of the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, anywhere but South Vietnam. Yeah, exactly. All the places that we were flying in the Pacific. So he said, look, you would be the official company representative in charge of the entire operation at the station. I said, Great. And he said, you would be our director for operations in Vietnam and Cambodia. I said, really? I said, uh, no, I I we're talking about Vietnam where the war is going on, are we? He said, yes. So look, uh there's the uh peace talks are going well in Paris. They might have a ceasefire agreement coming up soon and things will settle down. And I said, no, I don't I don't think so. I don't want to go out there. He said, look, don't make a decision right now. Why don't you take a couple days off, take a flight out to Vietnam, talk to the people out there, see what it's like, and then make the decision. So he talked me into it. I went out there, and I can tell you this flying from San Francisco to Saigon is like an odyssey. I mean, first of all, you leave you're leaving San Francisco at 11 o'clock at night, you're flying for five and a half hours to Honolulu, you're flying from Honolulu to Guam, which is seven hours, you're flying from Guam to Manila, which is another three hours, and then you're flying from the Philippines to Vietnam. Wow. And between uh Hawaii and Guam, you fly across the international dateline, which means when I left uh San Francisco on a Tuesday night, well, an hour after departure, it's now Wednesday morning, it's after midnight. So you get to Hawaii at 3 o'clock in the morning, and then when you leave Hawaii to Guam, it's now it's and it's not only Wednesday, it's now Thursday. And so you arrive in Saigon Thursday morning around 10 o'clock. Um as we approach the coastline to Vietnam, I'm looking out the window, I'm looking for, believe it or not, I'm looking for the war. So I'm looking out the window and I see these craters that appear to be bomb craters from B-52s or whatever. And I'm also seeing fighter planes and C-130s sort of crisscrossing below as we're approaching Saigon. And we land, and I spent a week there, and uh I decided that, you know, what I'm seeing now is not what I'm seeing on the 6 o'clock news back in the United States. I mean, Saigon is a bustling city. There are lots of Americans, lots of foreigners there. Um, my predecessor arranged for a reception for me, and I got a chance to meet a lot of the foreign community, some of the embassy staff and the ambassador. And by the way, the ambassador, Ambassador Martin, his daughter was a Pan Am flight attendant. Her name was Janet Martin. Oh, I did not know that. Yeah. So right away I had this great connection. I mean, the ambassador's daughter was a Pan Am flight attendant. So she would come out uh uh to visit the ambassador and her mother uh a couple times a year. So we we got to be pretty good friends. Um so on the way back to San Francisco, I decided I would take the assignment because what I saw was uh an opportunity to uh manage a station that uh had a worldwide recognition because of the war. And there was no doubt about it. As you drove around Saigon, you could see that this was uh a situation where uh the military had a lot of uh exposure there. There were South Vietnamese troops guarding various um government buildings and so on. And let me just tell you one more thing about that trip. Um I was staying at a hotel right a block away from the Pan Am Sales Office in downtown, and uh on the roof of the hotel was a restaurant uh set up there, and I'm up there having a refreshments and dinner with my predecessor, and we're looking out over the horizon, and Saigon was the terrain was very flat. You could see for you know all the way out to the horizon. It was a beautiful view from up there. So suddenly we're up there, and all of a sudden I hear these booming sounds off in the distance, and I see these flashes of fire, I mean, many miles away. And I said to Bob, I said, Is that what I think it is? He said, Yep, it happens every night. So there you are. You had a a bird's eye view of the war, and uh what those folks were on our side, fortunately. But that was something that I I came to uh live with um over the next two and a half years, even after the ceasefire, that that those booms continued. And so I decided to take the job, and I was single at the time, and I my uh fiance uh back in San Francisco, uh we decided that I would uh take the assignment and spend the three or four months and see how things would go before we would decide to make a move for her to come out to Saigon. So three months later in March, um we were married in Sostelino, California, and she moved to Saigon. So for her, it was really culture shock, you know, from Sostalito to Saigon, it's a whole different game.

SPEAKER_00 15:52

I can imagine a whole different ballgame. Did you have a good experience in those couple years before Saigon fell?

SPEAKER_09 16:01

Oh yeah. We had a we had a great staff out there, all of our public contact people, salespeople, they all spoke English and Vietnamese and French in many cases. And you know, believe it or not, you know, it's a it's a pan-am office in Vietnam, and there's a Pan-M office all around the world in you know, 86 countries. And for me, it was just going to work uh, you know, as a Pan-M manager for the operation in Vietnam. And we had two um two flights a week, Tuesday and Thursday, 747s. And uh, of course, the ceasefire agreement in fact was signed in January of 1973, and basically, at least on paper, the war was over. When that ceasefire agreement was signed, I uh I read the whole agreement. In fact, I still have a copy of it. And what I what I read, it seemed to me that this was not going to have a happy ending. Because basically, what happened was uh later on, um, I'm trying to think now, when we had the Watergate scandal in the United States, and we had a lot of uh anti-war demonstrations in the United States, and the Congress was under a lot of pressure. And since the war was officially over, and we trained uh, you know, all the Vietnamese army, Air Force personnel, and so on. In fact, the the number I think was the South Vietnam had a one million man army that we trained and financed uh throughout the war. So the Congress decided to make drastic cuts for military aid and economic aid to Vietnam. And once that happened, that was the beginning of the end, because the president of South Vietnam decided to draw back the troops that were holding territories and provinces throughout South Vietnam and draw them back to Saigon to protect Saigon. So once the South Vietnamese troops were not in position anymore throughout the northern part of the South, the North Vietnamese started marching south, and they just kept marching and marching and marching with no interruption, no shots were fired, which is uh is um is when at some point I knew that this was not going to end well, and we had to start planning to evacuate our employees. The biggest challenge I had at that time was when will it end? Um as you as you watch the progress of the North Vietnamese heading south, you could see the territory getting smaller and smaller, and as I used to call it, Saigon was the end of a funnel, and sooner or later it was going to happen. The problem was most of the community they really didn't feel that way. I mean, things were going on as normal, as if you know, eventually this will stop and we'll we'll uh we'll be fine. The North Vietnamese will will um eventually um permit South Vietnam to function, but it was not going to happen. I mean, my dilemma at the time was trying to decide when we should evacuate and uh take our employees and their families out. Looking at the map, I could see that Saigon was in the crosshairs of the North Vietnamese, but the big decision was when would we have to leave? And suddenly it dawned on me, looking at the calendar, that May 1st was May Day, which is a very special uh communist holiday. And I decided that would be the day that Saigon would fall. So from that point on, I started working backwards to see what would be the appropriate time for us to leave. And it seemed to me the best thing to do would be to leave on Thursday, the 24th, and that would give us enough time to uh to be out of Saigon before the fall. And it also would indicate to the community that this was Pan Am's normal scheduled flight. We uh we operated on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so there would be no suspicion that this would be the final departure. And I want no one knew this was our final departure because um if the word got out that uh we were evacuating all of our staff and everything at that time, we might have uh you know an invasion of that airplane and it would get pretty ugly.

SPEAKER_00 21:18

We have a clip from the movie, The Last Flight Out, that I wanted to share. Uh, let's take a listen.

SPEAKER_04 21:24

Uh hell the North Vietnamese themselves said it'd take years. Well, it took weeks. And count on the South Vietnamese officer corps. I believe the current penalty for desertion is a life sentence in Switzerland with a number to count. You ever hear frequent wind or option four? You do have somebody at the CIA.

SPEAKER_00 21:43

So, did you have a contact in the CIA?

SPEAKER_09 21:46

Oh, yes, I did. Um, and as I mentioned before, I uh I had a good relationship with the ambassador and also his secretary and some other members at the embassy. And Bottom line is that uh it was no secret at this point that Saigon was going to fall. One of the things that I did in order to keep our operation in a classified setting was to communicate with our headquarters in New York and Honolulu and my boss in Hong Kong via coded Pan Am messages. We had a code book that I could use to send messages. So no one in our staff could could know what was going on in terms of uh our planning operation.

SPEAKER_00 22:33

One turning point was on March 30th, 1975, when Denang started to fall. We have a clip from CBS News on that last flight, a Boeing 727 World Airways plane. Uh let's take a listen.

SPEAKER_01 22:51

In South Vietnam, Dunang has become a Dunkirk, with one crucial difference. Unlike Dunkirk in World War II, Dunang is stricken with rampant panic. As the enemy approaches, the panic has swept from the coastal city's crowded back streets and pagodas onto runways at the airport. Ed Daly, president of World Airways, has been flying refugees to Saigon. But today, the government and the U.S. Embassy refuse to guarantee airport security because of mobs rushing the planes. Despite that, Daly flew in today to pick up women and children. CBS News correspondent Bruce Dunning was among the last of the Americans to leave Danang late this week, but he went back aboard Daly's plane today to witness what was supposed to have been a mission of mercy. Here is Dunning's exclusive film report on the tragic results.

SPEAKER_02 23:40

Reports from Saigon said thousands of people were roaming Danang airfield. But as the plane landed, this did not at first seem evident. But then people poured from behind buildings and repetments, racing on cars, jeeps, trucks, pondas, and on foot, desperate to get to the plane and make sure they got on before anyone else. From the cockpit, the pilots reported by radio that the situation was out of control. Several times the pilots moved the plane, hoping to break the crowds around the rear ladder. There was no control. High-ranking officers in the mang have fled, leaving soldiers and airmen to fend for themselves. The board tried to jam up the stairway, and Daly himself tried to block the stairs. As men clamoured over one another, pushing aside women and children in their panic-stricken fury, members of the air crew dragged them onto the plane, trying to fill it as fast as possible. The tension and panic intensified. The heavily armed men were menacing. They left their wives, their children, their aged parents on the runway while they forced their own way on board a rebel of young enlisted men. CBS News cameraman Mike Marion and soundman Maven Duke dared not leave the plane, aware they might not be able to get back on. One newsman was left behind as the crowd pushed him out of reach of the plane. The stewardesses dragged people on and rushed into seats, screaming all the while, Where are the women and children? They piled four, five, and six men into seats intended for three. Finally, there was room for no more. The plane began to move as people still clambered up the ladder. Angry men left behind fired pistols and automatic weapons at the plane, determined that no one would go if they couldn't. A grenade went off under one wing, damaging it. Unable to move on the blockaded runway, the plane raced down the taxiway, swerving to avoid those, perhaps even running over people. As the plane strained laboriously into the air, people were still clinging to the wheels on the rear stairs. Seven men fell off as the plane reached heights of a thousand feet or more. As the plane reached six thousand feet, one man was still stuck in the ladder. Bailey had to climb out and pull him back as the plane swerved and shuddered under its heavy load. As calm fell on the smug men who had managed to fight off their friends and relatives to get on, the hardworking cabin crew took account. Two hundred and sixty-eight people were on board, among them five women and two or three small children. The rest were some of the men whom President Q said would defend the nagg. They had no apparent feelings about leaving others behind, only gratitude that World Airways had saved their lives, with the flight that Ed Daly intended for refugee women and children. Once in flight at low altitude, because the damaged rear stairway wouldn't close, the pilots assessed the damage to the plane. Bullets had damaged gas lines and the plane was losing fuel. The pilots were not sure the wheels would function on landing because people had attempted to hide in the wheel wells. The flight from Denang to Saigon normally takes about 50 minutes. This one took more than an hour and a half. Another World Airways plane flew alongside trying to assess the damage and reported that the cargo hatches were open and full of people. One man on the escort plane said that that crew was praying for us on the damaged plane. Not knowing whether the wheel assemblies would hold, the flight crew put the plane almost empty of fuel down very gingerly on the runway at Saigon. And the deserters on board cheered. As the plane taxied to a parking place, soldiers poured out of the luggage holes. As Cameram Merriott was filming the unloading, a South Vietnamese Air Force security officer arrested him for taking these pictures. The Air Force had things under control again. But the men and women of World Airways had brought their plane and its load home. Bruce Denning, CBS News.

SPEAKER_09 28:15

Yeah, the uh incident in Denang, of course, when Denang fell, which, you know, it's the second largest city in South Vietnam, you knew that the writing was on the wall, that this was coming to an end. But I can tell you about the World Airway 727. I was at the airport that day when that plane landed in Saigon, Hans Nud airport. And the the information that I've uh that I've found out about that airplane was basically a 727, that particular series, uh, maximum capacity is probably 122 people in an all-can economy configuration. From what I've read, they say that that airplane holds the world's record for the number of passengers on a 727. It was in the neighborhood of 300. I would say 200 at least were in the cabin and the rest were in the cargo hold baggage compartment. And not only, not only that, but it's it's it's just a tragic situation where people are so desperate that you know the aft stairs on a 727 uh normally are retracted before takeoff. Well, in this particular case, as you saw, they were not retracted, and people were hanging on, and uh daily was beating people off to get off, and people had climbed up not only in the bag compartment but in the wheel well as well, where the landing here is. Uh so when this airplane touched down in Saigon, and by the way, when they took off from Dana, people were we used in the clip you see that people were chasing the airplane on motorcycles and whatever, and uh I think it went through a chain-link fence at some point and damaged the leading edge flash. Somehow they were able to fly it to Saigon, and unfortunately, a couple of folks um you know couldn't hold on much longer on to the stairs and dropped into the South China Sea. Uh, but when that airplane parked in in Saigon at Tonsunuk, um I saw the blood, you know, coming out from the uh undercarriage where the uh landing gear is. So unfortunately, uh some folks perished uh once the gear was retracted. So that was that was a very sad scene. Now when I saw that, when I saw what had happened in Denang, my first thought was, oh my goodness, I can't imagine what would happen to a 747 if we had the same situation. If they can put 300 people on a 727, how many people would would a 747 carry? And I I just could not imagine having our airplane go through that type of situation. And that's another reason why uh all the planning was kept confidential, because if word got out that on April 24th, Pan Am 747 that's parked out there on the ramp is going to be the final Pan Am departure, well, who knows? Who knows what would have happened to that airplane. So the next thing that happened, and this is what uh finally uh this very sad incident gave me the idea of how we could evacuate our employees. And what happened was um, you know, due to the large presence of American servicemen in Vietnam over the years, a lot of orphans uh came into the picture. And these orphans were being handled by adoption agencies in Vietnam and in the states. And um, in order to have an orphan uh get final approval for adoption, that process would take quite a while as well. It was it was a long, drawn-out bureaucratic process of paperwork and so on. So what happened on April 4th was that when it was obvious that things were falling apart and we had to start doing something with the orphan movement, the uh the uh orphanages in Vietnam was they were able to get the government to wave a lot of the bureaucratic, you know, paperwork that was involved in moving orphans. In fact, they they waived everything and just said, get them out of here, you know, because in fact the North Vietnamese the word was that they didn't want these mixed race children to be to be part of the population once they took over. That was the word that we were getting through channels. So they decided to wave all of the paperwork and just let them go. And what happened on April 4th was uh the United States decided to operate uh a C5A into Saigon to start the so-called Operation Baby Lift uh movement. And quite frankly, you know, uh a C5A is not designed to carry babies or children or civilians for that matter. I mean, it's a huge aircraft that has a huge capacity for carrying tanks and Humphies or helicopters and troops. The uh President Ford authorized the uh operation of a C5A to start taking these kids out. So the C-5A comes in, and I was at the airport that day, and they were using a couple of pieces of ground equipment that belonged to Pan Am to help with the loading. And they were loading all these babies on the plane, and they were volunteer nurses, doctors, and so on. Finally, the airplane took off, and I watched it take off, and it headed out to the east in a normal pattern. And then I went into the office at the airport, and a few minutes later, I heard a lot of helicopters flying overhead, which was not unusual, but this seemed to be an unusual amount of helicopter traffic. So I went outside and looked, and I saw this uh column of black smoke rising from about uh, I don't know, maybe a mile or two from the end of the runway. And I said, Oh no, I hope that's not what I think it is. And sure enough, that's exactly what it was. The C5A had crashed. The first thing I did was I got on the phone and called the embassy, and I spoke to the ambassador secretary, and I told her that the orphan evacuation flight uh had just crashed and it doesn't look very good. And so she told the ambassador, and then of course, you know, the place was just bustling with all kinds of ambulances, helicopters, and panic and whatever. And we found out that, you know, unfortunately, a lot of people lost their lives, and and uh what happened was there was a malfunction in the aft cargo door, uh blew off, and it sucked out these kids and people out of the back of the airplane, and then they perished. Um so back in in the States, and uh, I guess around the world, as a matter of fact, this was big news, you know. And in uh in Connecticut, there was a guy by the name of Bob Macaulay, and he was just you know stunned by this whole thing, and it really got to him. And he called Pan Am in New York and he took out a second mortgage on his home in Connecticut and chartered a Pan Am 747, and uh he wanted the Pan Am to fly out to Vietnam and bring all these kids back and the survivors and so on. And then there was a second 747 that was chartered by I think a couple of the orphanages in the States. So on April 5th, 24 hours later, and by the way, you know, because of the time difference, when it's 3 o'clock in the morning in in New York, it's 3 o'clock in the afternoon in Saigon and vice versa. So you could be on the phone at 3 o'clock in the morning in Saigon talking to New York because it's 3 o'clock in the afternoon. So there was a lot of that going on. And uh we rearranged the routing of some airplanes. One airplane that was in Hong Kong going to San Francisco was rerouted to Saigon, and the second airplane came in, I think, from Bangkok, I believe. All of a sudden, 24 hours after this tragic accident with the C5A, there are two Pan Am 747s heading for Saigon to evacuate not only the survivors, but other evacuees and other children as well. And uh that particular day, April 5th, I told uh operations in New York, I said, okay, let's let's not have the second 747 come in until the first one is airborne, because I just didn't like the idea of having two 747s sitting on the ground at the same time. I mean, these were valuable assets, of course. And in as I had mentioned earlier, the the terrain in Saigon is flat. And at the tail of a 747 is, you know, what a eight, ten-story tall building, maybe, and you could see that for miles. And the last thing we needed was to have a couple of guys out there launch a couple of rockets at these airplanes. So what happened? We loaded, we loaded the planes, the first one. And as a matter of fact, at this point, we didn't know what caused the accident. We it could have been sabotage, it could have been mechanical, we didn't know. But there was talk about sabotage or it was shot at or something. No one knew is what had happened really at that point. So when we started loading these babies on the first 747, we were, believe it or not, we were padding them down to make sure there were no explosives in the diapers, if you can believe that. But that's what we did. And uh yeah, um, once we loaded the first airplane, and by the way, I went on that plane before we locked the door, and I walked through that plane, and we had babies in cardboard file boxes, we had babies in bassinets, we had babies on the floor in bassinets. We had, you know, if you could picture a seatbelt over the top of a bassinet or whatever. Um, and the screaming was going on, and the stench of urine was going on, and I got off that plane, I said, Oh my god, they're gonna be flying from Vietnam to California with all of those babies. So the airplane, it was just perfect because as that first airplane was wheels up, the second airplane was on final approach. So we did the same thing all over again, and we had both airplanes departed and uh headed for the United States without incident. Uh, however, there were uh I don't know exactly how many, but I know at least one or two uh children that were very sick uh uh perished uh on the way to the United States and and passed away en route. But I'll never forget the day when when those airplanes took off and anyhow that was a day to remember.

SPEAKER_00 41:16

How did that make you feel? Uh I mean you helped save hundreds of children.

SPEAKER_09 41:24

Well, you know, it was it wasn't just me. I mean, I just happened to be there and and got involved in a lot of the arrangements, but you gotta remember we had volunteer pilots, volunteer flight attendants, volunteer nurses, volunteer doctors, and we had people along the way. I mean, this was not a non-stop from Saigon to San Francisco. This plane stopped a couple of places along the way, and we had crew changes, and it was a Herculean effort by a lot of people. But I just I was just happy that we pulled it off. I mean, so many things could have gone wrong. Fortunately, it all worked out. So it was just a very, very sad and difficult time for everyone, um, including myself, even though my wife uh had already left Saigon about a month earlier. I had her go back to San Francisco just to get her, you know, uh back in the States so I wouldn't have to worry about her uh getting stuck somewhere downtown or something. And as a matter of fact, I I moved out of our house, the company house, about three weeks before that. And I was living in a trailer at the airport with uh with an Air Force colonel. I wanted to be at the airport because uh things were starting to happen that made it very difficult to get around the city. And I could let me just tell you this one thing that really got my attention and gave me a clue as to what lies ahead. This was in uh early April, and I'm sitting in the office downtown. It was something around, sometime around nine o'clock in the morning or so, and all of a sudden, there's an airplane flying at a very low altitude. It sounded like it was about to rip the roof off the building, and about 10 seconds later, there was this explosion, and my secretary comes running in the office and says, Mr. Topping, the beat con are here. She's screaming. And the office, by the way, was full of people, and everybody's screaming, erupting, running out. So that particular day, we had a flight coming in. So I got in the car and we're heading out to the airport. On the way to the airport, the streets were just jammed with people. Everybody was, I mean, Sagar, the major the major mode of transportation were motorbikes, and there were Like a zillion motorbikes, and the car was just surrounded by motorbikes and people. And they're looking at the car, looking in the car at me, and I could see the expressions were the expressions were like, okay, you're an American, you're leaving us, aren't you? Yeah, I mean, that's the feeling I had. We finally got to the airport, and I find out that our flight coming in from the Philippines is going to be canceled because the news media around the world is saying that Saigon is under attack. So I got on the phone right away because I found out on the way to the airport, I was talking to the embassy on my radio, that uh I found out that this airplane was flown by a South Vietnamese pilot, South Vietnamese pilot, and he was trying to bomb the palace, and the bomb dropped in the grounds, but it didn't do any damage. So basically, we were not under attack, except for this one uh South Vietnamese pilot who had his, you know, had an issue with the president, and he was trying to bomb the palace. Well, trying to convince Pan Am to operate that flight was very, very difficult. And, you know, I what else can you say? I'm telling them that look, Saigon is fine. It's just a lot of chaos, but Saigon is fine, that we're not under attack. So finally the plane did come in about three or four hours behind schedule. And let me tell you this: if that plane just had to come in because we had at this point, our flights were getting, you know, exceeding 50% in uh bookings, and we had over 300 people booked and waiting at the airport for this airplane. And no one complained about the delay because, you know, once we were able to tell them that the flight's running late, but it's coming in, and it did come in, and we loaded everyone and departed without any incident, and we were back to normal. But that was uh that was a scary time, but it it did give me uh a glimpse as to what lies, you know, what lies ahead in terms of uh chaos, panic, and so on. So our employees uh were getting very concerned about you know me not being able to tell them when we were going to evacuate them. And I was, I just had to share with them that it's it's something that we're working on and not to worry, we we will come up with uh a way to get them out. And the problem was that um, you know, from for me and my maintenance manager, who was the other, we were the only two Americans there, we have no problem getting out because we have you know U.S. passports and so on. But if you were Vietnamese, normally, in order to get a passport and an exit visa, it it takes a while. And uh, in fact, we would send people from time to time to to a training class or something in Hong Kong or somewhere, and it would take you know anywhere from a month, maybe longer, uh, depending on how fast they could process the paperwork, which by the way created another problem, which was our staff was wondering how we were going to get them out, and when would I let them know when we could evacuate them? Which brings up another dilemma, by the way. The company had authorized me to evacuate our employees, all of our employees, and their immediate families. Well, when you use the term immediate families in the Asian culture, you're not talking about our interpretation of immediate family, which is uh employee, mother, father, and children. We're talking about mother, father, children, grandmother, grandfather, uncle, aunt, and so on. And it just goes on and on. Basically, the immediate family is everyone that lives in the house, plus the folks next door. And so here was my dilemma. I I requested our human resources supervisor to give me a list of all the employees and all the immediate family members, and I explained to him that what the immediate family definition would be. So at the time we had 62 employees. So I get a list from him, and suddenly the list has something in the neighborhood of 600 names on it. And I said, okay, look, we we can't we can't uh accommodate everyone. And I said, I am not able to tell the employees who they can bring and who they can leave behind. So what we need to do is just have everyone get together, all the managers get together and talk about this and see if you can get this number down to a lower number. I didn't give them a number, but my in my mind I was looking for something in the neighborhood of 300. And so lo and behold, he did come back with 300, I believe it was 315 names, which was something much more manageable. And at the same time, it also created a situation where family members would be would be left behind.

SPEAKER_00 49:49

When was the final Panium flight canceled?

SPEAKER_09 49:53

Okay, about uh, I want to say about three days before departure date. And what happened was um we got word from New York that due to the level of hostilities in Saigon, the FAA has uh terminated all U.S. carriers from operating commercial flights in and out of Saigon.

SPEAKER_00 50:17

We have a clip from the movie about this. Let's take a listen.

SPEAKER_07 50:22

Now, what do you want, Mr. Daniel Hood? I tried your house. Don't you ever go home? It's bunker time, buddy. I sleep here. I don't sleep much. I stay here. So what's the next terrible thing that's gonna happen to my life?

SPEAKER_06 50:35

I gotta have 150 seats, no lists. I can't leave those people behind. We've been through this. Haven't you heard the expression you gotta keep trying until you get it right?

SPEAKER_07 50:44

Do you think I like this? Everybody treating me like I'm an executioner. I've done everything I can to get every possible person out of here. Don't you tell anybody what I'm gonna tell you?

SPEAKER_03 51:17

Trump and American World Airways, New York, reading. Flight 842, air out. Spoke to Jerry Ford. Told him no problem. Jerry said, if they can get your people out, I'll make sure you get one more flight. Flight 842 now officially redesignated military charter number NAD2. It will land the same time, same place as usual with all the volunteer crew. Get our people out and out.

SPEAKER_07 51:43

Give me 150 seats. Hold on, Hot Shot. One sixty six seats. I need 200 of them, plus my regular passengers.

SPEAKER_03 51:51

Don't forget the ones you promised me.

SPEAKER_07 51:53

All right, my people don't need seats.

SPEAKER_06 51:55

They'll stand. The plane's gotta be able to fly, Dan. That means get off the ground. It's a two-hour flight from here to Manila, huh? We can take off with the tanks two-thirds empty. No baggage. There's your weight. I'll tell you, my people will stand.

SPEAKER_00 52:07

Did you feel cut off and alone when they canceled this flight? And tell us about how you were communicating with PMHQ and what happened next.

SPEAKER_09 52:18

Oh, yeah, I felt very much alone. As a matter of fact, I'm thinking, here I am, you know, 10,000 miles away from home, and uh I've got this dilemma. And uh my friends back in San Francisco are uh had happy hour at the bars, you know. So anyhow, um uh my first reaction was this this has got to this has got to be fixed. We we we gotta have this airplane in here. So by the when all this is going on, our folks back at headquarters in Washington and New York are are working with the FAA to come up with an alternative plan. And sure enough, they were able to come up with a uh a plan to to avoid the FAA uh uh direction. And what the plan was to reschedule the flight as a US government charter flight between the Philippines and Vietnam and Vietnam back to the Philippines. So a few uh hours later we got the word that that's exactly what happened, and the flight was now designated as a US government charter between Manila and Saigon and back to Manila, just for that one sector. Getting back to our staff and uh and their families to be evacuated, my dilemma was how do I how do I get these folks processed in time to be evacuated before the North Vietnamese take over Saigon? And suddenly it hit me, and that had to do with the orphans. Since the uh government, you know, in fact, since Saigon uh was still, you know, in control of its destiny, I mean the the government was still in control, you you just couldn't process people without going through the proper procedures. So I suddenly had this crazy idea. I had our uh our human resources manager, I told him, I said, I need you to go down to the foreign ministry and find out what kind of paperwork I need to complete to adopt our employees and their families.

SPEAKER_00 54:39

Wait, wait. So a corporation, PAN, was going to adopt its employees. Is that what you're saying?

SPEAKER_09 54:49

That's what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_00 54:51

That's incredible.

SPEAKER_09 54:54

And he looked at me as if I had lost it. I said, no, let's let's try it. You know, let's try it because we it if if we can if they can uh waive the uh paperwork and and everything else to have babies adopted, why can't we adopt grown people, you know? And this the corporation is guaranteeing that we would, you know, adopt them and take care of them. He went downtown, came back with a stack of papers, and it was all filled out by everyone, and I just had to sign them. And I signed and I signed and I signed, having no idea what I'm signing because it's already written in Vietnamese. And sure enough, he took it back down there and they put the official stamp on it, and all of a sudden we have adopted over 300 people. And when uh it was time to evacuate uh the day of departure, we had three buses uh picking up all the employees downtown. In fact, some of the employees slept in the back offices downtown the night before, and also at the airport in the cargo area. The three buses were to be there about nine o'clock in the morning to pick up everyone and bring them to the airport. So I'm at the airport because I never went back downtown the last few days. I stayed at the airport all the time. I get a call from the sales manager downtown. He says, he says, the buses are here and the office is full of people. I how do we how what do I do? I said, I said, I don't, I don't know what to tell you, but I can tell you this. Do whatever you have to do, just get everybody out of the office and on those buses. And I said, put a sign on the window of the and lock the door and just put a sign that says Pan Am Office temporarily closed. Temporarily closed. And uh that was the end of the phone call. And I don't, to this day, I don't know, you know, what he did to get the people out of the office, but somehow he did. And uh they were the buses arrived, and I'm waiting for them at the entrance to the airport, the the checkpoint, which was manned by South of South Vietnamese Army, and I had the stack of papers, and I gave it to the one of the soldiers, and he didn't even look at it, he just sort of you know waved it off. But he got on the bus, he got on the first bus and walked through the bus with his M16 rifle over his shoulder and just looked at everyone. And I I mean that that scene was scary because no one said a word, and uh he got off the bus and they waved us through. We were able to get everyone on board, and we ended up with 463 people. And the other thing that I found out at the last minute was that when we took off from Saigon, and by the way, I was sitting in the jump seat behind Captain Burke, and I can tell you that uh sitting in that jump seat looking down that runway, and we started to roll, and I knew that this airplane was loaded, and I knew that the North Vietnamese could see this plane taking off, and I knew that they knew who we were for sure. And we had, by the way, we had people on that plane that got on at the last minute, and guess who they were? They were South Vietnamese army folks that took their uniforms off and put on civilian clothes, and not only that, they had weapons. I could see it under the shirt, you know. And we had our security manager there from Hong Kong, and after takeoff, and by the way, I wouldn't stop these guys from getting on the plane because I knew they were not going to hijack us. They wanted to get out of Vietnam like everyone else. And so, in order to avoid any kind of confrontation and problem at the last minute, we just let them on the plane and we collected, I think, I don't know, four or five pistols and put them in the cockpit after takeoff. But rolling down the runway for takeoff that day, uh boy, I could I could almost hear my heart beating. It was, it was just just a frightening moment. And we finally were airborne and started heading out. And uh uh once we crossed the coastline, I could look out the window and I could see in the South China Sea the entire uh fleet of American ships that's uh in position to assist in the evacuation by helicopter. And uh that's when I found out that we were not going to Manila, we were going to Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines. And the reason for that was um the Philip this flight, you know, even though it was redesignated as a military uh U.S. government charter, uh once it got back to the Philippines, it was now back on its normal schedule, going from Manila to Guam to Honolulu to San Francisco. So uh we now are going to Clark Air Base in the Philippines, which is a whole new wrinkle, which I was not aware of. And the reason for that was um the flight is going to go back on schedule. And in Manila, we've got 300 people, regular passengers, waiting to get on this airplane. Now, the only way to get them on is to get our people off at Clark Airbase. And uh so the flight could go back to uh its normal pattern. So when we arrived at Clark, I made an announcement on the plane to have our all of our people get off, or at least most of them get off, and no one moved an inch. They just sat there. And I think some people thought we were going to send them back to Sunigan. And I said, look, out the window, there's a DC-8, Overseas National Airways. We're all going on that plane from here to Guam, and then Guam you'll be processed, you know, in the refugee program there. So finally they got off and got on this overseas national airplane, and that plane would take them to uh Guam. Now I stayed with the with the Pan Am Airplane to Manila because we still have some employees on that plane. And we got to Manila, we're now running four or five hours behind schedule, believe it or not. And uh this is really interesting. Um I get on the um, we're on the ground in Manila and we're loading passengers and uh we're getting ready to load. And uh this guy, and now I I left the cockpit and I'm sitting in first class, and this guy sits down next to me and he says, Uh, were you on this airplane from Vietnam? I said, Yeah, I was on it. He says, Uh, do you know why it's raining so late? I said, Yeah, you got a minute? And I started telling him the whole story. And little did I know that this guy he took out a pad and pencil and he started making notes. Turns out he's a journalist from the LA Times.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:44

That just hit the jackpot.

SPEAKER_09 1:02:46

Yeah. So he writes, he writes all this stuff up. His name is David Lamb. He's passed away now, but he wrote up the story, and I have to copy the article right here in front of me, and it's dated April 25th, 1975. And the headline is 315 adopted by airline. Refugees reach Guam on cloak and dagger flight. That's great. That's that's just amazing that uh that happened that way.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:22

But one of your one of your Pan Am employees decided to stay behind as he did not want to leave his elderly mother. That must have been personally difficult for you. Let's take a listen to uh the farewell scene in the movie and then get your reaction.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:43

You must be going.

SPEAKER_07 1:03:45

I wish you were going too.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:48

I hate to travel. It took me all these years to get my house just the way I like it.

SPEAKER_07 1:03:53

I hope you'll be alright.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:55

Why should it bother me?

SPEAKER_07 1:03:56

I'm listening. Or will I ever find anybody else like you? Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:02

Maybe you'll come back one day soon. Your reaction, sir.

SPEAKER_09 1:04:10

Yeah, that was a very difficult situation there. It was a very uh emotional time for me for sure. And uh, you know, he made this the choice um because he his mother was uh too sick to travel, and uh he didn't want to leave her there alone behind. And uh, and by the way, at the time he had eight children, and uh he was also a little concerned about bringing such a large family to the United States, but you know, I try to encourage him to come, and if not, you know, that's that was the decision he he decided to make. And uh believe it or not, uh many years later, well, in fact, you know, that clip you just played where he says someday you you come back soon, someday, or something like that. Uh yeah, I I thought about that at the time, but not knowing when that would ever happen. But in fact, I did go back 15 years later, and that was the same time that the movie came out, and I went back because at the time I was working for the Pan Am chairman, Ed Actor, and I'm working out of the Pan Am building in New York, and I got a letter from him. 15 years later, I got a handwritten letter, and he's sharing with me some of the things that happened after we left. And uh it was, you know, I don't know, we'll we'll ever know what happens to some of the folks there, but uh in his case, he you know, when When the North took over the South, they they would go door to door to find out, you know, who you were and who you worked for and so on. And anyone that worked for Pan Am was basically, in the eyes of anyone else in Vietnam, would be working for the US government because we had a big role in in the war with RR flights and so on. And uh so uh when they identified him, he was uh he was uh placed in uh re-education camp type of situation, and he told me that uh he was placed in a uh cargo container at the airport with several other people. And uh by the way, if in Vietnam it's tropical in terms of temperature and it's in the 90s every single day, just about the only time there's a little bit of reduction is during the monsoon season. But um if you can imagine being in a cargo container on the tarmac at the airport as your as your punishment, uh he became very ill and they basically sent him home to die, but he didn't die. And so I I went back after I got the letter because the in the letter he was asking me about uh is it is it possible to help him now to get him and his family out, you know, 15 years later. And at which point I kind of said, oh my gosh, how do I do this? Uh so I looked into it and found out that there was a program in place to uh to get folks out that you could sponsor them, because at this point we were now we had limited um uh relationship with Vietnam, uh no embassy, but we had a consulate in Saigon and Hanoi, I believe, and uh we had an embassy in Bangkok that was kind of doing double duty. So I went back to Vietnam and uh 15 years later and landed on that same runway we took off from 15 years before. Wow. And I have a there's a picture in the book of his family, they met me at the airport on arrival, and uh now he had 11 children and eight daughters and three sons, and uh we started working on sponsoring and we got approval to sponsor his three youngest daughters, and uh two years later in 1992, they they arrived in Miami, Florida, 17 years later, and uh of course we're very close to that family. We we get together from time to time, and uh he's he I got him a job with United Airlines in Miami for a while, and he retired, and he's now uh all of his daughters are here in the States, and his three sons are in Vietnam, and uh he spends he was spending half the time here and half the time back there, and now he's getting on in years, and he's spending most of the time in Vietnam right now. That was that was just an amazing thing that you know the way we left Vietnam in 1975, with all the circumstances that we were faced with, and then to go back 15 years later, just reliving that whole thing was just amazing to go through that whole process in a whole different environment. And the terminal was the you know, nice new terminal, and um went downtown, and I think there's a picture in the book of uh of me standing in front of the Pan Am office in Saigon, and the Pan Am logo was still over the door 15 years later. And here's a good one for you. I went back to the company house that we used to live in, which was right across the street from the an embassy compound for embassy staff, and also the uh the vice president of South Vietnam lived across the street. So we had lots of security on our street. If I go back to the house, and uh in the house, I had an office, and I went with uh you know a guy from one of these escort services, and he was doing the translation for me and everything, and uh they he explained to them who I was. I used to live there, and they said, sure, you can he can come in and look around if he wants to. So I went in. And in the office that I left 15 years earlier, the American Embassy phone book that I had at the house was still sitting on the desk. Wow. That's wild. I couldn't believe it. And then, of course, I went downtown to the office and looked around there. It's now some kind of a French trading company or something. And I went to my office downtown, which was a nice, you know, wood panel office and everything. And uh I used to have pictures of nicely framed pictures of Pan Am airplanes all through the years. And uh all those pictures were gone because I left them, I left everything there, and there was only one picture on the wall, and that was the picture of Ho Chi Mint.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:48

So then let's talk about Hollywood for a second. So they turned your story into a Hollywood movie aired on NBC in 1990, uh, but it has the wrong airplane.

SPEAKER_09 1:12:03

Oh yeah. Yeah. Um what happened with that was uh Pan Am uh the production company that did the movie, they needed a 747 to make it real. And they needed the airplane for I think it was a couple of weeks or more to do the filming. And Pan Am did not have an airplane available for that length of time to be out of service. So they actually used a L1011 that was a TWA airplane. Yeah, as a matter of fact, I think on the first draft that they ran, the TWA logo was visible in the cockpit, actually. So they had to take that out. But they repainted the plane and made it, you know, pan-am librian colors and everything, and and that's what it was. It was an L1011, and uh it was formerly a TWA aircraft. And as a matter of fact, I I think I'm very happy we had a 747 because that L1011 would not have been able to handle what we were involved with uh in April 75, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:17

Well, thank you so much for sharing uh your incredible story. Uh Pan Am is still widely admired around the world and still holds the public's interest to this day. There's so much interest in Pan Am today uh for many people, even those that were not even born yet when the company went out of business in 1991. We have a museum in New York. How does all this make you feel?

SPEAKER_09 1:13:41

Well, you know, uh Pan Am is a very, very special airline. Um my my license plate frame on my golf cart says aviation pioneer, Pan Am. Um we we did some things around the world that I don't think any other airline has ever come close to doing. I mean, we've been involved in evacuations, bursting missions, we've been involved in pioneering the jet age. We flew the first schedule service around the world. We had flight one and flight two, flight one left from New York, flight two left from the West Coast, and they would sort of crisscross somewhere along the line in India or Thailand. Uh we flew the first commercial jets, uh, the 707s across the Atlantic. And uh I mean there's so much history. Um we flew to places that we were the only airline flying there, you know, from the United States. Um we uh we built runways, we built airports, we flew across the Pacific for the first time. No one has ever done that. You know, puddle jumping across Pacific, the first airplane to first airline to do that. Um I always say Pan Am is more than an airline, you know. Um I traveled quite a bit. One of my jobs after Vietnam and all that was uh uh working in uh headquarters, and I used to uh head up a team, and we would go to different stations and do uh one-week station evaluation and do an audit basically on the airport operation, uh maintenance, uh check runways, talk to tower people in the control towers. We did an exhaustive uh customer service serve um inspections at different airports. And I can remember one trip that we went on, I did New Delhi, Bombay, of course they have different names now, and Istanbul in Turkey in a three-week period from back to back to back. And once we finished the the inspection in Turkey, I'll tell you what, I was ready to come back home. And when that Pan Am airplane pulled into the terminal and I saw that logo and I I saw that flag, oh I'll tell you what, it was like thank God for Pan Am. I'm heading home. And it's it's just a very special airline.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:36

Well, thank you again for your time. It's been an honor speaking with you. I know that some of these memories um may have been painful to uh recount, and uh I want to thank you for your time.

SPEAKER_09 1:16:49

Oh, you're quite welcome. I'm uh a little emotional about some of this, but uh it was all worth it.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:56

Thanks again. Pan Am was a pioneer in air travel and still stands as one of the most iconic and innovative airlines in aviation history. That legacy lives on at the Pan Am Museum in Garden City, New York, where you can explore the rich history of the aircrafts and individuals at the heart of the company known as the world's most experienced airline. For more information about the Pan Am Museum, check out our website at www.thepan Amuseum.org. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. As was once a tagline in one of our commercials, we would greatly appreciate your support to help the Pan Am Museum continue making the going great. We want to hear from you. If you have a question for us or want to share your story, our email address is podcast at the Pan Am Museum.org. And with that, we're going to close out this extended episode with a Pan Am song, a special request from Al Topping. As flight crews once said to passengers departing for their destinations around the world, thank you for flying, Pan Am Pan.

SPEAKER_08 1:18:19

There's a place where the sun comes in. Come and highlight in the sky. It's only a day dream away. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We want to share somewhere.