Pilot David B. Kendall — known as ‘Farmer John’ because of his rural background and fondness for wearing bib overalls when off duty — had ended up with a sick helicopter on the morning of April 29. It lacked a main generator, had no working radios, and had oil streaks running down both front windshields. But because his instruments were in the green, he took off anyway. Kendall had made several pickups of Air America personnel when Ed Reid, assistant rotary-wing chief pilot, told him to load up with passengers at the DAO and fly out to Blue Ridge to drop them off, refuel, and have light maintenance done. By the time he reached the command ship, shortly before noon, his chopper’s entire windshield was covered with hydraulic oil. As he landed on the ship’s single helipad, the servos emitted a growl, indicating very low hydraulic oil. Asked by the deck officer what he needed, Kendall said fuel and maintenance. He was told that there was no maintenance available. Also, he could not refuel because it would tie up the helipad. The only option was for him to ditch the aircraft alongside the ship.

As Kendall voiced his objections, the deck crew removed the doors of the helicopter, tossed them over the side, and handed him a life jacket. He looked around to see if there was another ship on which he could land, but none was in sight. As he did not have enough fuel to return to Saigon, Kendall said he ‘decided to do as ordered by the deck officer.’ He flew off the port side of the ship, pushed the controls of the chopper to the left, and jumped to the right from an altitude of twenty to twenty-five feet. His dramatic departure from the aircraft was filmed by a news crew on Blue Ridge and received wide distribution.

Not long after Kendall dropped his helicopter into the South China Sea, Donald R. Buxton and Dennis C. Eisler approached Blue Ridge with ten passengers. The sky seemed filled with VNAF helicopters, all trying to land on the command ship. After orbiting for thirty minutes, Buxton was allowed to use the helipad. As soon as he touched down, a ship’s officer came running up and told him that he could not refuel. He would have to ditch alongside. While deckhands removed the helicopter’s doors, Buxton argued that he had to return to Saigon and participate in the evacuation. The officer told him that Air America was no longer needed: The military would complete the evacuation. Buxton refused to ditch; the navy would have to push the helicopter over the side. At that point the two Air America pilots were ‘firmly escorted’ off the deck and confined below. They were not allowed on deck until the following day, when they discovered their helicopter sitting forward on the flight deck. ‘In effect,’ they later reported, ‘our aircraft was impounded by the U.S. Navy…preventing us from completing our assigned mission.’

As so often happens, unpleasant incidents tend to occur in threes. And Thomas P. Grady, even before arriving on Blue Ridge, already had had an interesting morning. When he arrived on the Air America ramp, Winston told him that the Vietnamese were stealing helicopters and that he should find one and leave. Grady headed toward UH-1H 66-16162 and began putting his equipment in the aircraft. A jeep drove up with three VNAF pilots who said that they were going to take the helicopter. Grady, however, pulled out a gun and told them that they were mistaken, and they drove off. Shortly after that, a shell exploded about fifty meters away. Grady jumped into the Huey and got underway.

During the rest of the morning, Grady shuttled Air America personnel from downtown rooftops to Tan Son Nhut, receiving sporadic fire from ‘friendlies’ but taking no hits. After the last shuttle, he landed at the DAO tennis courts, where he was asked by a U.S. Air Force officer to take five passengers and eight hundred pounds of important cargo to Blue Ridge. When he arrived in the area, he found five VNAF helicopters, plus one of the stolen Air America Hueys, circling the ship. Low on fuel, he pulled up just in back of the ship and waited for a VNAF helicopter on the pad to leave. It departed five minutes later and ditched alongside the ship. Grady then landed and dropped off his passengers and cargo. By this time, the ship’s officers apparently had learned that Air America was an essential part of the evacuation, and agreed to supply the needed JP-4 fuel.

During the hot refueling process, Grady saw several large metal objects fly through the air from the forward part of the ship. He then felt a jolt, the instrument warning lights came on, and his oil pressure headed toward zero. Shutting down and climbing out of the aircraft, Grady said he found a helicopter tail rotor blade’sticking out of the side of my engine like a knife.’ (He later learned that a VNAF pilot in the stolen Air America helicopter had tried to ditch in front of the ship, but the Huey struck the bow and disintegrated.) Grady then looked up to see a VNAF helicopter attempting to land next to him. ‘But it was clear,’ he noted, ‘that there was not enough room.’ Grady grabbed his gear and ran forward. A loud bang quickly followed as the rotor blades of the two helicopters came together. The impact nearly knocked Grady’s aircraft off the back of the ship. The VNAF helicopter was caught by the netting around the pad, allowing the passengers to reach safety. The deck crew pushed the VNAF aircraft over the side and pulled Grady’s Huey forward, away from the helipad. The Air America helicopter obviously was through flying for the day.

By early afternoon, Velte was down to thirteen helicopters instead of the promised twenty-five. Although evacuation instructions were confused, and the Marine Corps helicopters were nowhere in sight, he decided to press ahead with Air America’s part of the plan. The thirteen helicopters began shuttling evacuees from Saigon rooftop HLZs to the DAO, anticipating the eventual arrival of the military helicopters to carry them to the fleet. When pilots reached seven hundred to one thousand pounds of fuel remaining, they flew the evacuees directly to the ships, refueled, and returned to Saigon.

Most of the shuttles could be termed routine, although there was nothing routine about the entire operation. Some missions were more’sporty’ than others. At age fifty-five, Chauncey J. Collard was surely the oldest helicopter pilot flying on April 29. A former navy lieutenant, he had been with Air America since 1965 and had survived the company’s hazardous combat-support operations in Laos. When the Air America pilots were grabbing helicopters before the Vietnamese could steal them, Collard had ended up with UH-1H 70-15866. He was not happy with it. The Huey was notoriously tail-heavy and would shake violently at speeds over ninety knots. Several weeks before, Collard had spent two days trying to correct the center of gravity problem but without success. He would have liked another aircraft for the evacuation, but he was stuck with 866.

Compounding Collard’s problems, he soon learned, was the disastrous loss of Air America’s fuel tanker. The Huey carried enough JP-4 for about two hours and twenty minutes of flying. With the refueling point now sixty to eighty miles away in the South China Sea, he would be able to make only three to five trips from downtown Saigon to the DAO before he had to head out to the fleet for fuel. His shuttles went off without major incident until midafternoon, when he was directed to pick up four CIA men on the rooftop of a three-story house across the avenue from the downtown Catholic church. Not a designated HLZ, the house stood in a circle of other houses, all surrounded by tall trees. Also, there was a wall running around the roof where they waited. ‘As I was alone,’ Collard noted, ‘I had to be careful in clearing my left side and tail from the trees and wall.’

Collard worked his way slowly to a landing. The CIA men came running out of the stairway, yelling that there were armed and unfriendly South Vietnamese on the floor below — and headed up the stairs behind them. Three of the CIA men jumped into the back of the helicopter, but the fourth individual decided that he was going to ride in the left front seat. This would be a problem because earlier in the day Collard had moved the seat full forward to prevent anyone from sitting in it. The man was ‘in full panic,’ Collard recalled. His eyes were huge, and he was sweating profusely. Dressed in a safari suit, Aussie bush hat, and carrying a CAR-15 carbine, he weighed more than three hundred pounds. Collard kept yelling at him to get in the back of the Huey, but he refused. ‘Somehow,’ Collard said in 1992, ‘he managed to get his gut and butt into the seat, and I damn near lost the controls while he knocked them around doing it. I couldn’t hit, or shoot him, as I had both hands full trying to hang on. When he finally sat down, I couldn’t move the cyclic because his gut was against it. To this day, I don’t remember climbing up through all those trees. That fat, panicky S.O.B. pulled the collective pitch control up under his arm and we were now at least 300 feet up, and fast losing turns on the main rotor. Meantime, I’m trying to stand on the collective to get it back from this bastard trying to kill us all. I’ll never know how far we dropped RPM, but I finally got controls back.’

Collard flew to the embassy rooftop, about two blocks away. After landing, ‘I had to wrestle with the S.O.B. again, while he tried climbing out of the seat.’ He finally made it. He also managed to take with him Collard’s briefcase, containing his passport and other important documents. Fortunately, another pilot spotted the briefcase as it lay on the roof and returned it to Collard later in the day.

At 3 p.m. the marine helicopters arrived. Sea Stallions, capable of carrying thirty-eight combat-loaded troops, began shuttling evacuees from the DAO complex to the fleet, while smaller seventeen-troop-capacity Boeing CH-46 Sea Knights made trips to the fleet from the embassy. Fillipi had worked with Marine Corps aviation representatives in developing a helicopter traffic control scheme so that there would be no conflict between the military and civilian aircraft. The plan worked well, as did the separate communications network for Air America aircraft upon which Fillipi had insisted.

Air America helicopters continued their rooftop operations, assisted by the arrival around 4 p.m. of the four aircraft from Can Tho. At the request of O.B. Harnage, CIA air officer at the embassy, several helicopters were assigned to collect people from the Pittman Apartments at 22 Gia Long, residence of the CIA’s assistant chief of station. The helipad at the Pittman occupied a tiny space atop the building’s elevator shaft. It was difficult to reach from the rooftop, and Fillipi had had a sturdy ladder built so that people could climb up to the helicopters. During one of these shuttles from the Pittman to the embassy, UPI photographer Hugh Van Es caught a dramatic shot of Harnage leaning down to help people up the ladder to a helicopter flown by Robert Caron. This photo received worldwide distribution — and fame — although the captions often mislabeled the picture as one of a military helicopter atop the roof of the U.S. Embassy.

The security situation on the rooftop HLZs deteriorated as sunset approached. Most Americans had been evacuated, and there remained only increasingly frantic Vietnamese. Larry Stadulis was flying a UH-1H with the redoubtable ‘Farmer John’ Kendall, who had boarded the helicopter after Stadulis earlier had landed on Blue Ridge. Stadulis was directed to pick up a single American who remained on the USAID rooftop pad. It turned out that the individual was Edward Twiford, a retired CIA employee who had been hired in March to help Air America with financial matters. Twiford had been part of the security detail that had been keeping order on the pad. Now, he was one white face among a sea of Vietnamese, many of them armed.

Stadulis and Kendall swept in and immediately executed a high hover while Ralph Begien, head of Air America’s Flight Information Center, reached down and brought Twiford into the helicopter. As the Huey lifted off, four Vietnamese grabbed the skids, while others opened fire on the helicopter. Risking his own life, Begien, who was not wearing a seat belt, leaned far over the side and pulled in the four men. When the Huey later landed on USS Midway, navy personnel told Kendall that it had a single bullet hole near the fuel line. ‘It is a wonder we didn’t have 50 holes,’ Kendall commented.

Velte called off the rooftop evacuation as it grew dark, meaning to resume operations the next day. The seventeen remaining Air America helicopters landed on the ships of the evacuation fleet in the early evening, with most of the aircraft ending up on USS Hancock. Marine helicopters continued the evacuation throughout the night and into the next morning. Ambassador Martin departed shortly before 5 a.m. on April 30. (Air America had earlier carried out his wife and their two dogs.) The last to leave — at 7:53 a.m. — was the marine detachment at the embassy. Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese shortly thereafter.

Air America was credited with lifting more than a thousand people to safety. ‘That was no small accomplishment, to be sure,’ CIA analyst Frank Snepp observed, ‘particularly in view of the fact that the maximum capacity of each Huey was barely twelve people.’ But, as Ralph Begien pointed out, the number of evacuees should have been higher. ‘Air America did a good job,’ he wrote to his parents on May 5, ‘but we all wish the order to evacuate had come earlier as we would have been able to have brought out many more people than we did.’

Air America received little acknowledgment for its efforts. But that was not surprising, given the company’s policy of avoiding publicity throughout the Vietnam War. Nonetheless, the helicopter pilots — supported by superb maintenance — had performed admirably in a challenging situation. Failure to provide security for the Air America ramp, chief pilot Winston pointed out, ‘compromised the entire operation.’ Also, lack of a safe alternative fuel supply prevented maximum use of the helicopters. Winston concluded, ‘This could have been a disaster.’ The operation succeeded only because of the skill and determination of the pilots. ‘As a group,’ Tony Coalson emphasized, ‘we were the best in the business.’ The company’s pilots normally flew more than one hundred hours a month in difficult operational environments — and they had been doing it for years. The experience gained over the years paid off in March and April 1975. As Coalson noted, ‘We flew our aircraft to their limits and beyond — and we flew ourselves to our limits.’

Honors were passed out following the fall of Saigon. The Marine Corps Association named HMH-463 the helicopter squadron of the year for 1975, and Colonel James Bolton, commander of HMH-462, the aviator of the year. On May 5, 1975, CIA Director William Colby cabled Velte: ‘The withdrawal from Vietnam draws to a conclusion Air America’s operational activities….Air America, appropriately named, has served its country well.’ But the pilots never heard even that modest accolade. The CIA would not publicly acknowledge its ownership of the airline for another year, and it would not issue a commendation to these secret soldiers of the Cold War until 2001.

---

This article was written by William M. Leary and E. Merton Coulter, and originally published in the Spring 2005 edition of MHQ. William M. Leary is the E. Merton Coulter Professor of History, Emeritus, at the University of Georgia. Anthony F. Czajkowski is a former Central Intelligence Agency officer and contract historian with the CIA. This article is adapted from a book that they are writing about Air America.

For more great articles, subscribe to MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History today!

Pages: 1 2 3