Southwest Airlines Captain Bryan Knight brings his father back to Dallas to rest in peace. Col. Roy A. Knight was shot down in the Vietnam War in 1967. His remains were recently found and returned home. Captain Knight narrates
Washington Post: Bryan Knight was 5 years old when he waved goodbye to his father from Dallas Love Field Airport. He never saw him again.
The year was 1967, and Roy Knight Jr. was heading to war. The pilot reported to Udorn Royal Thai Air Force Base in January. By May, after flying near-daily combat missions, Knight was missing, his plane shot down over enemy territory in Laos. It was another seven years before his family found out he had been killed. And on Thursday, 45 years after that, they finally received closure.
Knight’s remains, recovered near his plane’s crash site more than five decades after it went down, were flown from Honolulu to Oakland, Calif., and from Oakland back to Dallas, where his family greeted the Southwest flight as it arrived.
Bryan Knight, the son who watched his dad leave to fight in the Vietnam War, was also the man who flew him home — the pilot of that flight from California to Texas that landed at Love Field, the last place the two saw each other.
