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Robert Macauley

When he learned that it would take more than a week to evacuate the surviving orphans due to the lack of military transport planes, Macauley chartered a Boeing 747 from Pan American World Airways and arranged for 300 orphaned children to leave the country, paying for the trip by mortgaging his house.

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Macauley first became involved in major charitable efforts following the Tan Son Nhut C-5 accident in April 1975, in which a United States Air Force Lockheed C-5 Galaxy carrying South Vietnamese orphans as part of Operation Babylift, crashed on landing killing more than 150 and leaving 175 survivors, many of them among the 2,000 children awaiting transportation to the United States in the days before Fall of Saigon to forces of the Viet Cong later that month.

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