On February 12, 1973, this particular aircraft, then a C-141A, was flown to Gia Lam Airport, near Hanoi, North Vietnam in the first mission of Operation Homecoming, the repatriation of former American prisoners of war. There were 40 former POWs on that first flight. One of the POWs on the first flight was Navy Commander Everett Alvarez Jr., the first American pilot to be shot down in North Vietnam and, by the war’s end, the second longest-held POW there. (The longest-held was US Army Captain Floyd James Thompson who was released the following month.) Alvarez had spent eight-and-a-half years in captivity.