A cool story from 1986.

Andrew De La Pena was 5 months old and in desperate need of a heart transplant in California. Word came from Fargo, North Dakato that a 4 month old, Michael McCann, had died from crib death…. but whose heart had been resuscitated. It could save Andrew’s life but the heart had to be delivered to California within four hours.

They had a Leerjet set to go but at the last minute it wouldn’t start in the icy weather so an emergency call was made to the Governor and within 16 minutes a call went out to the North Dakota National Guard base in Fargo (bureaucracy can move fast):

An F-4 fighter jet with the North Dakota Air National Guard was scrambled. Brig. General Bob Becklund, who was a first lieutenant at the time and on duty, would be the pilot.

An F-4 is a two seater fighter jet. The only storage compartment is underneath and its not climate controlled. So the tiny life saving heart was packed in ice and placed in a picnic cooler. It would ride in the seat behind Becklund.

Becklund touched down in California and handed over the cooler to a Stanford University ambulance crew. The transplant was done successfully despite missing the four hour window.

The story doesn’t mention it but the F-4 Phantom took off at 3:06 a.m (it was a Mach 2+ fighter plane) and did the trip in 3 hours 37 minutes for the 1500 mile flight (a typical commercial airline flight on that route takes almost 6 hours).

It’s called the F4 Hooligan’s Heart Flight (the nickname for the National Guard F-4’s was the “Happy Hooligans”) and there is an annual fundraiser.