Cheers to 80 years !

After the quiet, subdued walk to the aircraft and the cheering after it took off, Brenneman promised himself, “When I get to be an older pilot, I will be flying one of those.”

A 7th Military Airlift Squadron C-141 brought the first 20 POWs to Travis, landing at 4:30 p.m. on Valentine’s Day. The first POW down the stairs was Navy Capt. Jeremiah Denton, who was greeted by cheers and applause from a crowd of more than 400 family, friends and off-duty Travis service members. He was the first of 280 former POWs who came through Travis from then to March 31.

“As we neared Travis, we asked the aircraft commander for a good look at the Golden Gate Bridge. So many guys had dreamed of the bridge while they were gone,” said former POW Col. James Sehorn in a 2002 i nterview. “The aircraft commander got special permission and did a loop around the bridge. The guys crowded into the cockpit and around every window to get a glimpse. The Golden Gate Bridge was a symbol of being home.”

Two years later, in March 1977, Travis aircrews brought back the first remains of those who were missing in action. Those missions have continued.

As South Vietnam fell apart under a North Vietnamese offensive in 1975, Travis aircraft returned to the country in spring 1975 to evacuate the remaining American personnel and, under President Gerald Ford’s order, Vietnamese orphans in what was soon called Operation Babylift.

Disaster struck the operation on April 4, 1975, when a Travis C-5 carrying 228 orphans and 86 passengers had a rear cargo door break loose shortly after it left Tan Son Nhut, decompressing the aircraft and sending it into a rice paddy two miles southeast of the airfield. It killed 78 orphans and 60 other passengers. The survivors were put on another aircraft and flown to San Francisco.

Travis also took part in Operations New Life and New Arrivals, which flew more than 150,000 people from Southeast Asia to the United States between April and September 1975. Most of the flights went to Hickham Air Force Base, but several landed at Travis after the resettlement centers in Hawaii were filled. The base commander even set up 300 beds in the base gym to handle the newcomers.

Travis went under the budget-cutting knife along with the rest of the federal government in 1976, when President Jimmy Carter started cutting the government employee workforce. Travis lost about 19 percent of its civilian workforce between then and 1980.

In April 1979, Travis again became the destination of contract civilian flights from refugee camps in Asia organized by the State Department. That brought more than 68, 300 refugees through the base until those flights were moved to Oakland in April 1980.

Interspersed between all these military operations were a host of humanitarian missions, such as earthquake relief for Lima, Peru, in May 1970, and for Managua, Nicaragua, in December 1972, as well as for victims of Cyclone Tracy that tore through Darwin, Australia, in December 1974. In the case of Typhoon Pamela that hammered Guam in May 1976, Travis aircraft flew 31 C -5 a nd C-141 m issions to that island to help it rebuild.

1971: From May 21 to 25, Travis experienced rioting resulting from tensions in the Airman dormitory area and the Vietnam War. Onehundred and thirty-five people were arrested, 80 of them detained overnight. The base had to call for police assistance from at least 70 officers from the civilian community. (USAF photo)