The aircraft was emblazoned with a famous black-and-white photograph of Phan Thi as a nine-year-old child – an image that made her known as the “napalm girl” – showing her naked, screaming and fleeing an attack during the war Vietnam.
Fifty years after this photo was taken, Phan Thi is drawn to helping Ukrainians flee the war in their country for the safe haven of Canada, just as she did decades ago.
“I just remembered what’s happening to them now … I was there. I understand what they need,” she said in an interview from her home in Ajax, Aude.
“I’m so grateful to be alive and to be there for them, give them hope.”
Phan Thi, who years ago founded an organization aimed at helping war-affected children, is currently working to support newly arrived Ukrainians and hopes to go on more flights like the one she took last month.
She first became involved with the effort last month after receiving an email from a social justice organization asking for permission to use her famous photo as a child on the outside of their plane.
Enrique Pineyro, a pilot and founder of the organization, Solidaire, planned to fly this plane from Warsaw to Regina with more than 200 Ukrainians on board.
“I said, ‘Wow, that’s so great.  We can work together,” Phan Thi said. “Because that’s the impact of my photography, even 50 years (after), right?”
Phan Thi, 59, said she gave permission for her photo to be used and asked if she could join the trip, a request to which Pineyro quickly agreed.
The trip required careful planning, however, to ensure that Phan Thi could travel.
He had received laser treatments in Miami to repair some of the skin damage he suffered from napalm, a gel-like substance that explodes easily and ignites on impact with a target.  Her 12th laser round was scheduled for a few days before she had to leave for Warsaw.
“I had to ask my doctor, ‘Don’t do (the treatment) so hard,'” said Phan Thi, who was willing to speed up the treatment time.  “Because if he treated me too deep or hard, I’d have to be home for two months.”
Phan Thi said the change in treatment was worth it for the experience of welcoming the 236 Ukrainians who boarded the flight.
“I just stood side by side with my picture on the big plane. And they come up the stairs, and I was there at the door and I welcomed them,” he recalled.
“I just thought at the time, yes, 50 years ago, I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  But right now, I’m at the right time and the right place, to be there, to deliver what people hope for.”
Phan Thi, who still feels pain from the burns she suffered on the day of the napalm attack in 1972, has vivid memories of what was captured in the famous photo.
He was playing outside near a bomb shelter with other children after noon when a soldier suddenly shouted at them to run.
“I saw the plane, it was so fast, so close and so loud,” he said.
“I stayed right there. I was a kid, I had to run, right? But I didn’t. I just stood right there. Then I turned my head, I saw the plane. And then I saw four bombs land.”
A series of booms thundered overhead and flames erupted, he recalled.
“The fire was all around me. And of course my clothes were on fire. And I saw the fire above my arm,” she said, recalling burning her right arm after trying to wipe the napalm off her left arm.
“Then when I (got) out of that fire, I saw my brothers, two of them older and younger. Then I saw my two cousins, then some South Vietnamese soldiers. Then we just kept running and running and running.”
At one point he got tired and shouted: “It’s too hot!  She remembers that a soldier gave her some water to drink.
“He tried to help me, he threw the water on me,” she said.  “I passed out. I didn’t remember anything else.”
Her relationship with the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo, taken by Associated Press photographer Nick Ut, has changed over the years.  As a small child, Phan Thi said, she hated the image, and as a young woman she resented the publicity it brought her.
But her mind changed after she moved to Canada in 1992 and became a mother.
“I never (wanted) my baby to suffer like this little girl, like I did when I was a child,” she said.  “This image really resonates in my life and I feel that this photo is a powerful gift for me to do something while I’m still alive.”
Phan Thi is a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador and has spent years traveling the world lecturing and sharing her story.  He also founded the Kim Foundation International to support children affected by war.
Since the pandemic hit, she has split her time between caring for her elderly mother, who suffers from dementia, and trying to help her brother in Vietnam get a visa to visit Canada to fulfill her mother’s wish to see him
With the arrival of Ukrainians in Canada, Phan Thi hopes to do more to support newcomers by sharing lessons she’s learned over the years.
“I learned how to live with love, with hope and forgiveness,” he said.  “We must work for peace.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published on August 3, 2022.