09/04/2026
Thank for your service......
February 13, 1986. Richard Reinhardt was in Hartford Hospital waiting for a heart transplant when doctors got the call they had been hoping for. A donor heart had been found.
There was one problem. It was in Oklahoma City, 1,415 miles away.
Doctors wanted the heart transplanted within four hours of being removed from the donor. No available commercial or medical aircraft could get it to Connecticut in time, so the hospital called the U.S. Air Force.
Captain David Lefforge and radar navigator Captain Steven Bruger, based at Pease Air Force Base in New Hampshire, were on a routine training mission when they were redirected.
An FB-111A and a KC-135 tanker headed for Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma. A second FB-111A followed an hour later as backup.
The heart reached Tinker in the early hours of Valentine’s Day. The container was secured on Bruger’s lap because it was the only place in the cockpit where it would fit, and the cockpit was the aircraft’s only pressurized area.
By 3 a.m., they were airborne for Connecticut.
The FB-111A flew at just under 700 mph. Bruger sat beside Lefforge with a human heart in his lap.
“It was Valentine’s Day. We had this heart; we were going to save someone’s life,” Lefforge said afterward.
At about 5 a.m., they landed at Bradley Air National Guard Base. A helicopter was waiting to take the heart the final distance to Hartford Hospital.
From the moment the heart was removed from the donor until it was transplanted into Reinhardt: 3 hours, 59 minutes.
Five weeks later, Reinhardt met Lefforge and Bruger at the hospital and shook their hands. He went home the next day.
Reinhardt lived another 23 years with the transplanted heart. He died in 2009, survived by his wife, two children and four grandchildren.
