IT was February 11 2004, the day that the Gadfly column took wings, slipped the surly bonds of custom and practice and landed on page three. Page three's done differently here.

Until that Wednesday morning four months ago, few in the North-East would have heard of Andrew Mynarski VC nor of his selfless courage.

Though he remains a national hero in Canada, the only acknowledgment at Teesside Airport - the then RAF base from which he flew his last mission - was a small portrait in the hotel bar.

The column's prime target was to name the airport in honour of Mynarski, the heroic 27-year-old who put out his hand and touched the face of God.

The hybrid alternative, the specious Durham Tees Valley, was the work of some meretricious municipal Mephistopheles.

"The new name is a tribute to least worst pragmatism," we wrote. "Andrew Mynarski represents something better and nobler by far than Durham Tees Valley."

So we have failed. The airport and the earth bound people responsible for it never entertained the notion for a second. Durham Tees Valley was set in syrup, if not stone.

The statue is necessarily second best but - carefully executed and proudly proclaimed - will be a fitting tribute for all that.

When it happens, which undoubtedly it will, it will also be tribute to 78-year-old Betty Amlin, the ex-Canadian airman's wife from Sedgefield, who cannily flew her kite in this direction.

"I hope you don't mind me writing to you but I feel that I'd like to," that self-effacing letter began. To name the airport after Andy Mynarski, it concluded, would be a wonderful thank you for the past and the future.

Without exception, supportive e-mails and messages arrived from all over the world.

Without exception, they were also amazed that Mynarski could so effectively have been airbrushed out of Teesside aviation history.

Now we all have a chance to put that right, to salute Andy Mynarski as he - uniform ablaze and about to plunge to certain death - saluted Pat Brophy, his friend and senior officer.

"Goodnight, sir" he mouthed and Brophy, the only man who'd witnessed that great gallantry, miraculously lived to extol it.

The statue won't just be for Betty Amlin, of course, but for all those Canadian airmen and their families reuniting at the airport this weekend and for those who never had the chance to join the remembrance.

Holiday commitments mean I won't be able to join them tomorrow. Operational commitments - Andy Mynarski might have enjoyed the innocent irony of that - mean that day to day responsibility for the developing story will have to be exercised elsewhere.

It's good, very good, that the statue campaign is itself about to take off. Help it, please, in memory of a very fine man, and of his comrades in arms.

Goodnight sir, God bless.