For those of you who think there are no heroes anymore, look around you. They are found in many jobs we take for granted, like firefighters and policemen, motormen and mailmen and mechanics. And pilots.

My father started his flying career in the Navy where he flew a P2V Neptune in VP10, stationed in Argentia, Newfoundland. After that, he flew for Northwest Airlines for 34 years, from 1958 until 1992. During this time, he took off and landed over 14,000 times safely. He had several engine fires and countless engine stalls. He was hijacked once. In addition, he was required to take a rigorous check ride every six months for his entire career, almost 70 of them. And during all of this, he transported over two million passengers from one place to another, without a single incident.

Below is a four minute thirty second 320 x 240 .wmv file of his last landing for NWA on June 19, 1992, flight 326 Heavy (DC-10), runway 29L, at Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport.

326 Heavy
Left-clicking on the link will bring up the file. This is for high speed connections only. Right-clicking on this link will save the whole file to your hard drive. Choose "Save Target As". The file is 10.1 MB