The Last Flight from Da Nang

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Bruce Dunning, the CBS News correspondent whose 1975 television report on the last flight from Da Nang vividly captured the frantic end of the Vietnam War, died Monday in New York at the age of 73 ...

He is best remembered for his award-winning and dramatic report on March 29, 1975 aboard a 727 World Airways jet attempting to rescue refugees from the airport in Da Nang, South Vietnam. The five-and-a-half-minute report -- long even then for a television evening news segment -- was broadcast on the "CBS Evening News" Saturday edition anchored by Dan Rather, who introduced Dunning's segment with the words "Da Nang has become a Dunkirk."

As Dunning narrated on the scene, the camera showed the throngs running for the plane as it landed and then he described how it filled up almost instantly with young Vietnamese military deserters, some armed and "menacing." "The men President Thieu said would defend Da Nang," said Dunning. The camera then captured the stunning images of the airline's president, Ed Daly, punching young men to the tarmac who were trying to get aboard the overloaded airliner's rear stairs and then, at 6,000-feet up, pulling in one last straggler, still holding on through take-off and ascent after seven others had fallen. The aircraft's mission was to gather as many women and children as it could hold, but as Dunning reported, the crew counted 268 persons, among them just five women and "two or three young children."