At least three of our celebrity billionaires — Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson — like flying things and making huge spectacles. This caused quite a few people to ask whether these men would help out with the evacuation of Afghanistan.
That may have been a really bad idea, or maybe it would have helped. Surely the U.S. government would have frowned upon it either way.
But it does recall an interesting bit of history from Vietnam and the fall of Da Nang and Saigon. It’s a history of Ed Daly, owner of World Airways. The story below is from my 2006 book, The Big Ripoff:
***
Pistol in hand, his open shirt flapping in the wind, Ed Daly was trying to get his plane off the ground. At the foot of the stairwell of his Boeing 747, the amateur-boxer-turned-airline-executive beat back the soldiers trying to board his plane — the last flight of out of Da Nang, a South Vietnamese city about to fall to the Vietcong.
Daly finally climbed aboard, raised the ramp, and shut the doors, with an unruly throng of Vietnamese soldiers still on the tarmac. He gave the order, and pilot Ken Healy got ready to take off. Someone had turned off the runway lights. Machine-gun fire rang out below. One soldier fired his pistol just past the cockpit window. The runway was littered with trucks and other vehicles driven by the frantic soldiers and refugees who wanted to board this last plane to safety. The control tower radioed in to Healy and Daly, “Don’t take off! Don’t take off!”
Healy, taking a cue from his boss’s bravado, sent one last message to the tower: “Just watch me.” With a wing flap damaged by a grenade, Healy, Daly, and over 300 South Vietnamese refugees took off in the dark. Healy could not lift the landing gear — seven of the refugees had packed into the wheel wells. He also couldn’t climb above 10,500 feet—dozens of Vietnamese were crammed in the cargo holds, which could not be pressurized.
Daly and Healy brought these refugees to safety in Saigon, where they would eventually be taken out of a country that American soldiers had already abandoned. Daly’s flight marked the end of the U.S. effort to save refugees from Da Nang, which was reportedly about to be sacked by the Vietcong. His flight was also unauthorized — Washington had called off the refugee airlift the day before.
A few days later, Daly led “Operation Babylift,” flying Vietnamese orphans from Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut airport, darkened and also under threat of Vietcong attack, to Oakland California, from which point they would be placed with Amercan families and many set on the road to normal lives. This flight, too, was unauthorized. “I’ve been told for 25 years I’ve been in this business that things can’t be done. But I’m a believer,” Daly said.
***
Why was this story in my book about corporate welfare? It was partly a story about overregulation. While newspapers lavished praise on Daly, calling him the “Bravest Man Alive,” he had critics in Washington for his flights. One of the criticisms was that he only flew these flights as a lobbying ploy. At that time, airline regulation effectively barred competition in air travel. To fly a route, you needed to convince something called the Civil Aeronautics Board that your route was necessary. If someone else was flying that route, the CAB was not inclined to allow it. Daly, his critics charged, was trying to garner public support so as to pressure the CAB to allow him to compete against bigger airlines.
That, of course, is an indictment not of Daly, but of the regulatory state.
