{"id":153812,"date":"2024-03-01T08:00:04","date_gmt":"2024-03-01T13:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=153812"},"modified":"2024-02-29T19:07:09","modified_gmt":"2024-03-01T00:07:09","slug":"valor-friday-265","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=153812","title":{"rendered":"Valor Friday"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Orestes Lorenzo Perez<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Having been to the USS Midway Museum, I’ve seen the Cessna O-1 Bird Dog landed on her deck by South Vietnamese Air Force Major Buang-Ly. Major Buang stole the plane, loaded his wife and five children into the nominally 4-seat observation airplane, and flew out to sea. He did so because it was April 1975 and the communists had just won the war, and Saigon was falling. American warships in the area, among them Midway, took in the refugees as they came. Famously, the crew of Midway pushed tens of millions of dollars of military equipment by hand into the sea to make room on her flight deck for more RVN helicopters.<\/p>\n

Major Buang, with no solid plan for where he would go, took his family and headed out. He soon enough found Midway. He circled a few times, signalling his intent to land, but the Bird Dog is not a naval aircraft and not designed for a carrier arrested landing. He finally dropped a note to the crew of Midway on a low pass, advising that he could land, if only they’d move a helicopter out of the way.<\/p>\n

Deck hands shoved the UH-1 in the way right off the side of the ship unceremoniously, and Major Buang was able to make a perfect landing on Midway. His bold, perhaps even suicidal, flight from the homeland he’d fought to defend resulted in the evacuation of his wife and five kids.<\/p>\n

This week, I came across a similar story, from a few years later. Orestes Lorenzo Perez (pictured above, center) was a Cuban Air Force pilot. He defected with his MiG-23BN (a variable swept-wing fighter-bomber) in 1991. Now a single-seat fighter has no room to spirit a whole family away from communism. I imagine if one tried, it would draw significant attention if you were walking your wife and kids out to your fighter jet before a sortie.<\/p>\n

Perez, on a training mission, defected with his plane to NAS Key West. Landing, he requested asylum, which was soon granted. Eventually his plane was repatriated, as usually happens in these cases. The plane is meticulously cataloged, inspected, documented, and then shipped back to Cuba in a crate. Normally this also includes a bill for the transport costs (which is never paid).<\/p>\n

Now, how was Perez to save his family? Even with help from the President of the United States (GHW Bush), after well more than a year, Castro wouldn’t let them go. Perez would have to go get them. If caught, he would surely face death for his traitorous act.<\/p>\n

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Cessna 310 example<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

With the help of a Cuban refugee organization, they bought a Cessna 310 (a twin engine light general aviation plane with 4-6 seats). He got a message to his wife to meet him in a specific spot, and flew there at just 100 feet over the water to avoid Cuban radar detection. Landing within 10 yards of his wife and two boys (who were wearing bright orange as instructed so he could see them), he took off again and brought them back to America.<\/p>\n

I can’t believe a Cessna 310 has the lifting capacity for this man’s cojones.<\/p>\n

Read more about the story at the Aviation Geek<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Having been to the USS Midway Museum, I’ve seen the Cessna O-1 Bird Dog landed on … Valor Friday<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":664,"featured_media":153813,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[187,10,389,217],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-153812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-air-force","category-historical","category-valor","category-we-remember"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/664"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=153812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153812\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/153813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=153812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=153812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=153812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}