A Flight Through Time

How time -- and so many other things -- fly by. Thursday, as usual, 137 United Airlines flights departed San Francisco International Airport. But the schedule carried a new departure: Flight 869. That Boeing 747 lumbered out over the bay at lunchtime and headed toward the Pacific, laden with passengers, cargo and hopes. At breakfast time this morning, if you eat about 7:25 a.m., the 747 is scheduled to land in Ho Chi Minh City, inaugurating the first daily direct air service between the United States and Vietnam in nearly 30 years.

Once, Vietnam and the United States were separated by much more than the globe’s largest ocean. When the last U.S. passenger airliners landed at Saigon’s renowned Tan Son Nhut airport in the spring of 1975, they belonged to Pan American Airways and descended in tight, sickening spirals to avoid enemy fire.

But today’s landing, on the third anniversary of the U.S.-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement, offers hope for continued normalization of relations between these onetime enemies.

Troubled United, founded in 1926 to haul mail between isolated communities in the American West, took over Pan Am’s Asian routes, so it’s only fitting it’s the first U.S. carrier going back to Saigon. Thirty years ago today, U.S. planes were delivering munitions and shiny new howitzers to South Vietnamese forces in what soon became Ho Chi Minh City. Today, commercial relations between Vietnam and the U.S. are increasing dramatically, and direct U.S. investment there has topped $1 billion. The ostensibly communist nation has changed too, as Hanoi has adopted some of the South’s affinity for freewheeling capitalism. What would Ho Chi Minh have made of his country’s bid to join the World Trade Organization?

U.S. Ambassador Raymond Burghardt calls direct air connections “the next logical steps.” Vietnam’s air travel and economy are among Asia’s fastest-growing. The number of U.S. tourists a year could soon exceed 400,000, drawing from Vietnamese expatriates, many on the West Coast.

The first daily flight home will depart Ho Chi Minh City at 6:15 a.m. Saturday and, thanks to the spinning globe and time zone leaps, will land in San Francisco the same morning at 8:40 a.m. The jet lag from Vietnam is about all that has stayed the same.