Tanker 475 is seen during the 1970s when it served as Air Force One (carrying Nixon) and Air Force Two (carrying then-U.S. vice-president Gerald Ford). Photograph by: Handout , Postmedia News

When the Saskatchewan government dispatched one of its water bombers to the U.S. last month to help fight the deadly and massively destructive wildfires raging across Colorado, the grateful authorities there didn't realize right away that a notable piece of American aviation history had temporarily flown home.

That's because the Saskatchewan environment ministry's custom-refurbished Convair C-131H — painted in the official provincial colours of green and white and known in this country as Tanker 475, a workhorse that has fought forest fires across Western Canada since it was purchased from a U.S. company in 2008 — was once identified by the most auspicious call sign in the world: Air Force One.

Literally once. On Oct. 26, 1972, when then-U.S. president Richard Nixon required a slower, propeller-driven aircraft to deliver him to a West Virginia airport with a runway too short to land the famous Boeing 707 — nicknamed "Spirit of '76" — that typically served as Air Force One at the time, the lumbering giant of a plane now routinely used to dump thousands of litres of fire retardant on blazing Canadian forests carried the planet's most powerful politician to a campaign rally ahead of that year's presidential election.

Remarkably, Nixon made specific reference to what was then a 28-year-old member of the U.S. executive aircraft fleet, a lavishly refitted cargo carrier that in 1973 would be dubbed “Air Force Two” while carrying Nixon’s vice-president (and soon-to-be successor) Gerald Ford to official events across the country.

"One thing I said to (then-West Virginia governor) Arch Moore when we were moving down the line here was that I thought this airstrip was a little bit short," Nixon told a crowd assembled at the City of Huntington airport on that day in 1972. "That is why we had to bring this Convair in. He said you were taking care of that. I just want you to know that as soon as you get a long enough strip, I hope to bring the Spirit of '76, that big plane, right into this airport."

Nixon went on to praise the flying skills of renowned Air Force One pilot Ralph Albertazzie, a West Virginia native who had dutifully taken the controls of the Convair to ferry Nixon to Huntington rally and would fly the president to nearby Ashland, Kentucky, for another speech later that day.

"Let me say the man who flew us — and I would say this is no overstatement — probably one of the greatest pilots of all time, is, of course, a West Virginian, Col. Albertazzie," Nixon said, according to a U.S. online database of presidential history. "Wherever we went, whether it was to Peking, halfway around the world, or Moscow, a third of the way around the world, or Warsaw, about a fourth of the way around the world, he was always on time, just as he was here tonight in West Virginia, his own state."

Nixon won the 1972 presidential election but was subsequently forced out of office by the Watergate scandal, leaving the White House and the Spirit of '76 to Ford. The Canada-bound Convair later left the executive-aircraft fleet and went on to serve as a transport aircraft in the U.S. war on drugs, flying several missions to South America.