THE first commercial flight between the United States and Vietnam since their war 30 years ago landed yesterday to open a new chapter of cultural and economic exchange between the former foes.

United Airlines Flight 869, fully booked with 347 passengers on board, landed at Tan Son Nhat airport after an 18-hour journey from San Francisco.

The flight was sent on its way with an elaborate departure ceremony. An audience of invited guests and passengers gathered to listen to speeches from American and Vietnamese dignitaries.

Passengers disembarking in Ho Chi Minh City were greeted by Vietnamese women wearing traditional white tunics, or aodais, and holding lotus blossoms and silk lanterns. The flight will be followed by daily flights between the cities as United seeks to capitalise on the more than one million Vietnamese who live in the US, the largest number in a single country outside Vietnam.

Some of those landing in Vietnam yesterday had not set foot in their native country since South Vietnam fell to the communist North in 1975.

They were joined by the actor David Hasselhoff, who celebrated his 15th wedding anniversary aboard the flight with his wife, Pamela. The Baywatch star took a consignment of wheelchairs to Vietnam from a US charity.

Tan Son Nhat airport has retained the name it bore when Pan American “freedom birds” took off full of American soldiers returning home after their tours of duty. The city they then left was Saigon, the capital of the wartime capital of South Vietnam which has since changed its name to Ho Chi Minh City.

The flight is the latest step in a reconciliation which has been decades in the making. Relations were normalised in 1995 by President Clinton after a Senate panel concluded there was no evidence that Americans troops were still being held prisoners of war, nor that any of the hundreds of US soldiers listed as missing in action remained alive. San Francisco established a twin-city arrangement with Ho Chi Minh City in April 1995, three months before normalisation. In 2003 the US exported $1.34 billion in goods and services to Vietnam, triple the value of its exports just two years earlier.

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