Soaring Valor Honors Veterans With Final Flight

Program helped over 1,500 visit the National WWII Museum in New Orleans.

Zach Vasile

Wednesday, October 01, 2025 at 02:47 PM ET

Verified

Edited By:

Travis Tingle

Veterans are led to the gate at Phoenix for one of the final Soaring Valor journeys. [Courtesy: American Airlines]

Key Takeaways:

The "Soaring Valor" program, a partnership between American Airlines, the Gary Sinise Foundation, and the National WWII Museum, concluded its decade-long initiative to honor World War II veterans.
Since 2015, the program operated over 30 all-expenses-paid charter flights, enabling more than 1,500 WWII veterans to visit the National WWII Museum in New Orleans.
The program provided veterans a sense of pride and social connection, and also involved high school students to educate them about the veterans' sacrifices.
Soaring Valor ended because many surviving veterans are no longer able to travel or have already participated, though the Gary Sinise Foundation will continue individual trips to the museum.

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A yearslong partnership that sought to honor World War II veterans by bringing them to the National WWII Museum in New Orleans operated its final charter flight in September.

The program, known as Soaring Valor, flew a group of veterans from Charlotte, North Carolina, to New Orleans on September 5. It was the last of over 30 all-expenses-paid trips that helped more than 1,500 veterans visit the museum—designated by Congress as the nation’s official World War II military history institution—since 2015.