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February 2012

ON THE COVER…

The final end of USAF SR-71 operations in 1997 came after many a previous attempt to ground this most spectacular of strategic reconnaissance assets. The story behind it was one of seemingly endless political and military in-fighting, one from which the ‘Habu’ was ultimately unable to escape. Shown on the cover is SR-71A 64-17971 of the 9th RW’s Det 2, cruising over California’s majestic Sierras during a training mission in the type’s final weeks of operation.
Cover image by Ted Carlson/Fotodynamics

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• SPECIAL REPORT
  Commemorating the Berlin Airlift,
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AIRLIFT MEMORIES

Flt Lt L. E. A. 'Zeke' Hacke, RAF Dakota pilot
During the airlift I was on No 30 Squadron. Prior to the airlift, the squadron was on detachment to an Airborne Forces practice camp in Schleswig-Holstein. We had a very enjoyable two months there towing gliders and dropping paratroops and playing at wars all around the North German Plain. On 25 June 1948, the squadron returned to Oakington in a nine-aircraft formation, led by the then squadron commander Sqn Ldr Johnston. That is a unique story in itself — Sqn Ldr Johnston was probably one of the most charismatic squadron commanders I had ever met. He was a survivor of the Burma-Siam railroad amongst other things. Remarkable man. Anyhow, on the way back he took us via the island of Sylt, just off the German coast. The RAF had a leave centre there which was very popular with aircrew. On arrival back at Oakington, he was instructed on the R/T to report to the station commander on landing. The rest of the squadron was told not to disperse, but to stand by in the crew room. We were all anticipating a good rollicking, because we'd carried out low flying over Sylt on the way back! But instead of that we were told that we'd be returning to Germany for special operations and that we ought to take sufficient kit for two weeks.
I and some of the others flew out again the following morning, the 26th. Most went initially to Wunstorf, but I didn't. I went with a flight of three aircraft to Bückeburg, not far away from the British Army of the Rhine headquarters, and for a period of time I flew a service called the P19 which was a passenger and mail service between Bückeburg and Gatow in Berlin. I did the first one on 26 June, and carried on doing the P19 service up until about July. Then I moved up to join the rest of the gang, who at that time were at Fassberg. That's when I started doing the lift proper. As the York force built up in strength, we, the Dakotas, moved out initially to Fassberg — which we shared with the USAF — and then on to Lübeck, where we stayed for the rest of the airlift.

A famous shot of a USAF C-54 on final approach to Tempelhof, welcomed by a large number of local Berlin children. PHOTO: USAF

RAF Yorks unloading at, and departing from, RAF Gatow — with civilian Lancastrians in the background.PHOTO: IWM

RAF Gatow became one of the busiest airfields in the world during the Airlift. RAF Dakotas and Yorks, civilian Lancastrians, and USAF C-54s can all be seen here.PHOTO: PA Photos

At Wunstorf, everybody was billeted in large dormitories in the attic of the Officers' Mess, and sleep was very difficult because there were other crews coming and going at all sorts of odd times. Straight after arriving, they were flying something like four sorties a day. The weather was pretty damn appalling at the time — there was incessant rain, winds and low cloud.
We used to use the centre corridor, flying outbound on one side and returning on the other side. Air traffic control was, to say the least, pretty basic, and I can remember in the early days that we used to get a recorded broadcast from Gatow saying to all aircraft approaching 'Here are your landing instructions', followed by the runway and altimeter settings, and it was then a free-for-all to join the circuit. Each aircraft simply broadcast his position in order to obtain some semblance of separation. When the Yorks joined the airlift, they used the centre corridor also but at a lower altitude, so we found ourselves having to climb and descend through their flight level, and without the benefit of radar coverage.
The one thing the airlift did for me was certainly to polish up my instrument flying, because our outbound altitude was about 5,500ft and it was remarkable how often there was a layer of cloud between 5 and 6,000, with a freezing level at that level also. We used to be given a time to arrive over the Frohnau beacon to the north of Berlin, and we were normally allowed a tolerance of plus or minus 30 seconds. Failure to arrive at the designated time could mean that we were sent back without landing. I've got to pay tribute to the navigators whose job it was to keep us in the corridors and make good our beacon times with very limited navigational facilities. I don't think I was ever sent back, nor did I ever hear of any RAF aircraft having to abort through failure to make good its time.
Our loads from Lübeck consisted mainly of coal, but they varied considerably. We also carried return loads — goods that had been manufactured in Berlin. There's one lovely story which has never actually been confirmed whereby one pilot said that on his trip in he'd carried a load of cement for the building of the new airfield at Tegel, and on the return trip he'd carried another load of cement labelled 'Made in blockaded Berlin'. The Dakotas, more than any other, got the job of carrying passengers out, though the Americans took some out. Most of the return loads of passengers were under-nourished children being flown to the West, and there were also a certain number of refugees. The RAF carried, overall, about 36,000 passengers in to Berlin — military and other people — and brought out 131,000. On the other hand, the USAF took about 24,000 in to Berlin and brought out 36,000. Flying the children was really quite something, because we used to save up our chocolate ration and give them all a small square of chocolate, something many of them had never seen. That helped to overcome their fear, because previously we were probably still thought of as 'Terrorflieger'. The Dakota had fold-up seats — really, canvas buckets on metal struts which could be folded up against the wall of the aircraft and then brought down if passengers were required. They weren't very comfortable, but at least you could sit down on them.
Co-ordination with the Americans seemed to work very well. The only difference was that they had, to a certain extent, a vastly better aircraft in the Skymaster. It wasn't until later on, when we got the Hastings and York forces built up, that the loads carried in by the RAF could approach anywhere near the USAF's loads.
Later, we usually had what they called block times. Blocks would be allocated to each airlift airfield, meaning each would mainly be one particular type of aircraft. Of course, the Americans came in through the south corridor from Wiesbaden and Rhein-Main into Tempelhof. It was only the ones from Fassberg and Celle that shared with us the north corridor. So the variations in speeds between different aircraft were not a problem. Air traffic control got vastly better — there's no question about that. Once they put in the large area radar at Tempelhof, the whole thing became much easier to control, and of course, the beacons were improved as well. It came to work remarkably well.
I can remember one flight out when I was carrying a group of adult Germans who, I think, were ex-PoWs of the Russians. They were getting them out of Berlin in a hurry because, if I remember correctly, they were quite vulnerable. It was absolutely terrible weather, and about half-way down the corridor we ran into quite large cu-nim storm clouds. At one stage, the aircraft pretty well stood on one wingtip! I called it a day, aborted and went back in. The Germans became more and more nervous the closer we got back into Berlin, because that was the last thing they wanted to do — they were possibly a bit worried about maybe being picked up by the Russians.

The expansion of the C-54 fleet assigned to the Airlift was crucial to its success.PHOTO: Berliner Flughäfen Archiv

A C-54 making the challenging approach to Tempelhof's Runway 27 Left.PHOTO: Berliner Flughäfen Archiv

One of Tempelhof's vital GCA (Ground Controlled Approach) units, with a departing C-54 in the background.PHOTO: USAF

The winter weather made things very difficult, really. Obviously all the aircraft had to be de-iced before they could take off, which was a horrendous job for the groundcrew going round in lorries and spraying all the upper surfaces with anti-freeze. Once they'd got the ice off the wings and we were flying, it was pretty hard going. You had to keep the de-icing boots and the glycol de-icers on the props running, and very often there were chunks of ice flying off and hitting the side of the aircraft. But it was just the sort of thing you had to put up with!
Going into Berlin, they had the GCA (Ground Controlled Approach), which was usually backed up as a double unit. They were absolutely fantastic, the controllers who talked you down. You'd go in over the Frohnau beacon, on to the beacon on the approach to Gatow's runway, and then the GCA controller would pick you up. I think they got so hoarse that they had to change the teams of controllers every couple of hours, because they were talking more or less continuously in bad weather. GCA had to be absolutely top-line, and they were — they were incredible. Getting back into Lübeck could be a problem because we didn't have GCA there; we had BABS (Blind Approach Beacon System) equipment, which worked off a radar. BABS was a talk-down system whereby your navigator in the back talked you down according to the blip that he got on his tube. Unfortunately, the approach to runway 26 at Lübeck was over the Russian zone, and that was where Lübeck had one of its casualties when the aircraft crashed on the approach.
There was some harassment from Soviet fighters, certainly. I don't really think I came across a great deal, although I can recall on one occasion a Yak fighter made a head-on pass, then swung round in a wide turn and came back and formated on us. I think we gave him a two-finger salute, whereupon he waved back and flew away. In the early days, there was a Russian Army camp situated just off the end of the runway at Gatow and they used to try and intimidate us by shining strong lights up as we took off. We used to retaliate by holding the aircraft down after take-off and flying very low over the barracks. With an aircraft going over every three minutes, they soon gave up!
The final mission I did, the 240th one, was on 9 September 1949, from Lübeck into Gatow. Then we went back home, and it was back to normal flying the routes again — the Transport Command mail run through to Warsaw, to the Middle East on fighter lifts, trips down to Gibraltar and so on.
It was a bit strange, really, having spent all the years of the war knocking the hell out of the Germans to go and help them afterwards. Sometimes it got very boring, sometimes it was very frightening, and we all lived in very cramped and uncomfortable conditions, but in retrospect I think it was probably one of the most interesting and rewarding times of all my years in the Service.

AIRLIFT MEMORIES

Capt Stan Sickelmore, Airflight Ltd Avro Tudor pilot
I came out of the Air Force in 1947 and decided to take up civil flying, so I studied for my civil licences. Having obtained them, I was then left out of work — there were a lot of pilots around during that post-war period. However, Stalin blockaded Berlin and there was suddenly a demand for aircraft and crews to fly on the airlift. The Americans and the RAF found that they hadn't got sufficient capacity to keep it going, and also they didn't have any tanker aircraft, so civil companies were brought in, and a number of the civil companies carried all the liquid fuel into Berlin. AVM Bennett, who'd just left British South American Airways, had just started his own small company, Airflight, with two Avro Tudors and advertised for pilots. There was my opportunity to apply for a job, and he found me satisfactory and employed me. My only training beforehand was that I was on bombers during the war, so I had multi-engined flying experience. This was one of the reasons Bennett thought I'd be suitable for Tudors. On 14 October 1948 I flew with him up to Wunstorf in his Percival Proctor and told me to settle into the Officers' Mess. At 06.53hrs on the 16th I was on my way to Gatow as co-pilot to our chief pilot Clem Utting.
Airflight had bought two Tudors, a Tudor II and a Tudor V, the big long-nosed varieties, from A. V. Roe. 'Roger Yoke' was the Tudor II, and 'Baker Yoke' was the Tudor V. From the outside you couldn't tell the difference. It was only inside that they varied, and that was mostly up at the flightdeck end. The flightdeck on the V was far smaller to make more room for passengers. Airflight's weren't the only Tudors on the airlift, because British South American used them. They had Tudor Is, and I think they had some Tudor Vs. They didn't work like we did, of course — they were a state airline, and they had a very easy time by comparison!
The Tudor was very suitable for what we were doing, because it was a very large aeroplane with a large capacity. It was hard to handle on the ground, because it had a tailwheel and had an enormous fin and rudder, so in crosswinds and gusty conditions it was more difficult on the ground than it was in the air. It handled very well in the air, and for the airlift it was very suitably-engined because it had Rolls-Royce Merlin 621s which were initially designed for fighters — in other words, to deliver high power for short periods. This was very useful on the airlift, because we were only airborne for just over an hour at a time each way between Gatow and Wunstorf. However, the speed didn't really matter, because we all had to adjust our speed to keep our spacing between aircraft for the purpose of arriving at our destination at exactly the right time.
The aircraft were used first of all to carry ordinary freight like bags of flour, coal and so on, but the Tudor wasn't suitable for that, mainly because as it was designed as one of the early pressurised passenger aircraft it only had a very small passenger entrance door. That made the loading and unloading of bulky sacks and things very difficult, so Bennett brought them back to the UK and had them fitted with five Lancaster main tanks strapped in cradles in the fuselage. Each tank carried just over 500 gallons of fuel, and suitably linked together with hosing they were used to carry fuel into Berlin — 2,500 gallons plus on each occasion.
At Wunstorf, it was a matter of tankers coming up to the aircraft and pumping the fuel into a sealed connecting hose, which filled these five tanks with the fuel. During that time we'd be doing our pre-flight checks, and at the given time we'd taxi out and take off for Gatow. On arrival at Gatow we were directed to the liquid fuel unloading centre, which had several very large tanks underground. All they had to do in our case was connect the hoses at the tail end of the aircraft up to these tanks, and gravity would do the rest because the aircraft sat down on its tail. There were no particular difficulties. There were some changes during the period, with more efficient equipment to pump the fuel out and such like, but that part of it didn't concern us very much. When we got to Gatow we normally dashed across the tarmac to the Malcolm Club for a quick cup of tea while they were de-fuelling the aircraft — then, it was back to the aircraft and we'd take off again.
The civilian companies had a liaison officer at Wunstorf, a man from British European Airways named Gerry Foster, and he co-ordinated all the work between the civil operators and the RAF there. As for the actual flying schedules, we didn't find any difficulties with them. We had to simply keep to our timetable — we knew we were being fitted in within blocks of other civilian aircraft when that system was adopted. We through all through the days and nights — there was no particular routine in that respect. Generally speaking, we would do three flights a day or night for five days. The idea for us civil companies was then to have one day off and start again.
We were worked even harder than the RAF and the Americans, of course, because AVM Bennett was a hard taskmaster. He was an honest man — he never swore, he never smoked, he never drank. He was extremely intelligent and expert in all aspects of aviation, and even wrote a book on navigation. I learned a great deal from him, but he never asked you to do anything that he couldn't do or wouldn't do himself. That meant a lot of hard work. On one occasion, although I was supposed to have a day off after five days of three flights a day, my logbook shows that from 21 October to 2 November 1948 I flew 13 days on the trot, doing 28 round trips in that time. I then only had one day off before, on 4 November, we flew Tudor G-AKBY back to Blackbushe for servicing. During our four days there we were expected to take part in the servicing work, so I only had very little time with my wife before I was back on the lift again!
The weather was a problem that winter, but on the other hand sectors were quite short and we did have the various beacons and landing aids at Gatow, so we had some assistance. And although we had to stay in the corridors, they were 20 miles wide.

RAF Hastings TG532 during the Airlift.PHOTO: Jack Fellman via Warren E. Thompson

USAF C-47s on the ramp at Tempelhof during the early days of Operation 'Vittles'.PHOTO: USAF

There was camaraderie and friendly rivalry between the civilian companies to a certain extent, but to be quite honest with you were all so busy that we were either tired and sleeping, or working, or having a few beers in the Mess. And we didn't all stay in the same place. In our case we stayed in the Officers' Mess at Wunstorf, but many of the companies stayed in hotels and suchlike around the local area. Conditions in the Mess were very good — there was a skittle alley, a nice bar and comfortable beds, and it was well-heated and insulated.
I did 226 lifts into Berlin from Wunstorf, and most of those were simply routine, whether the weather was good or bad, to experienced pilots. But there was one occasion I recall when I was co-pilot to another captain, Gerry Parkinson. On the Tudor, we were not supposed to use either the heating system or the pressurisation system. This was due to the fact that two aircraft had been lost over the South Atlantic, and it was suspected that the heating system and the pressurisation system might have contributed to their loss. Anyway, it was freezing cold, and we were freezing cold, and Gerry said to me, 'Shall we light the heater?' The heater took fuel from the aircraft's petrol tank and burnt it in something like a blowlamp inside a sealed chamber, over which was ducted outside air. Highly efficient, actually — except that you had a little bonfire going just under the forward diesel fuel tank. What happened on this occasion was that the flightdeck filled with smoke, and we thought 'Oh God, we've got a fire'. I was dispatched back to grab the fire extinguisher, lift the floor flap and turn the extinguisher on to the flames. In fact, they weren't flames. What happened was that, over a period of time, when loading fuel into the big tanks in the fuselage, some diesel had dripped and splashed onto the insulation on the heater. It was just smouldering. We put that out, but we couldn't see the instruments for black smoke and we were choking to death, so we opened the windows. This was fine, and it cleared it immediately and all was normal, except that we were twice as cold as we were before we started!
The other occasion I remember very clearly was the terrible night that Clem Utting was killed. We'd just touched down at Gatow at 00.51hrs on 8 December 1948 in G-AKBY — I was Clem's co-pilot that night. The idea was that the radio operator and myself would finish off the closing-down checks and the captain would get out and liaise with whoever was meeting us. Then we'd all walk across the tarmac to the Malcolm Club for a cup of tea or coffee. This took about 10 to 15 minutes, during which time the aircraft would be offloaded. We'd dash back, get on the aircraft and fly off. On this occasion, Clem was about 10 to 20 yards ahead of Johnny Kilburn, the R/O, and myself when a lorry came up from our right-hand side heading past us and straight for Clem. The tarmac was floodlit but there were areas where it was, shall we say, very shady in the middle. We shouted a warning, but it was too late. The lorry hit him, ran over him and drove off into the night. We dashed up to help him — one of us, I think it was Johnny Kilburn, went up to the Malcolm Club and 'phoned for assistance. When the ambulance came and took him off to hospital, we couldn't go with him because we had to stay and move the aircraft once they had finished unloading. In the meantime, Bennett flew across as a passenger on another aeroplane and joined us at Gatow. He went to see Clem, by which time he was dying. In fact, Clem died four hours later. When we'd done all we could do, we flew back with the old man in the aircraft, leaving Gatow at 07.46 and getting back to Wunstorf at 08.59.
The driver of the lorry was never found. There were suspicions that it was deliberate — it looked deliberate. Clem used to wear a white roll-neck sweater and a white scarf. If we could see him from 20 yards away even though the tarmac in that area was fairly dark, surely the lorry driver could have seen him? It was suspected at the time that it could have been one of the German workers who perhaps had a grudge — after all, it was only three years before that we were trying to annihilate them. The other thing was that they might have thought that it was AVM Bennett himself, as of course 'Pathfinder Bennett' was very well known in those days. But neither the lorry nor the driver were ever found, and it was put down to an accidental death.

AVM Don Bennett (right), founder of Airflight, talks to the peaked cap-wearing Gerry Foster, the BEA man who acted as the liaison officer at Wunstorf between the RAF and the civil companies on the airlift. Stan Sickelmore is facing the camera. Meanwhile, Airflight's Tudor V G-AKBY is having fuel pumped into its internal tanks prior to a trip to Gatow.PHOTO: Stan Sickelmore

C-54s being unloaded at Tempelhof after the heaviest snowfall of the Airlift, on 1 March 1949.PHOTO: USAF

Celebrating the end of the blockade on 12 May 1949, in front of a US Navy R5D. Two naval units, VR-6 and VR-8, provided R5Ds and were attached to USAF Troop Carrier Groups for the airlift.PHOTO: Berliner Flughäfen Archiv

AIRLIFT MEMORIES

Ken Skoog, USAF C-54 radio operator
I went to radio school at Rhein-Main for three months. The big thing was code. You took a test every week... You were cut if you failed even once. Of the 120 who started the course, only 40 made it through. Of the 40 who went in for the grand test, only 10 passed. It was one of the toughest endeavours I have ever gotten involved in. While we were in the school, we went to Berlin five times for familiarisation. With the heavy usage of our C-54s in the airlift, we had to take them back to the States for a 2,000-hour major overhaul, and this led to my crossing the Atlantic 18 times during that period.
During the airlift... GCA would talk us in. At times it was so foggy that when you were in the downwind you couldn't see the airplane in front of you. I was in Berlin at least three times before I was able to see the apartment buildings at the end of the Tempelhof runway, and they were very close on either side right before touchdown! On top of this, we had to put up with those Russian Yak fighters. They would come in your corridor and buzz you. You never knew if they were getting in position to shoot or not.

By 'Dak' to Berlin

Aircraft's David Halford went along for the ride as Air Atlantique's veteran Dakota celebrated the Airlift and Tempelhof Airport
Like something from the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, the ribbon of sandbars thrusting out from the banks into the main flow of the River Elbe seemed to evoke the sinewy fingers of water sprites luring heedless sailors to their doom. The North German Plain is criss-crossed by an imposing river and canal system, with extensive wood and forest cover, the little villages dotted between them clearly visible from the Air Atlantique Classic Flight's DC-3 G-AMPY as she throbbed eastwards at 3,000ft, her usual 120-130kt speed enhanced by a brisk tailwind. This was our own 'Drang nach Osten', down a route that was fraught with danger 60 years ago, following a story that can always bear the retelling.
The idea of organising a special excursion to Berlin on this aircraft emerged from a meeting between the Classic Flight's marketing director Richard Parr and staff from Ian Allan's publishing and aviation tours departments. Concerned that so little attention was being paid to the 60th anniversary of the start of the Berlin Airlift, and by the imminent closure of Tempelhof Airport, the airfield most closely associated with that mammoth enterprise, it was decided to organise a short tour around the weekend preceding the anniversary. Over two dozen enthusiasts took up the offer, on a sortie that exceeded any undertaken by Air Atlantique's DC-3s for a number of years.
Our choice of 'mount', G-AMPY having seen RAF service as Dakota IV KK116 and today sporting those markings, could not have been more apt. Apparently, Air Atlantique's maintenance crew still encounters coal dust from the Dakota's Berlin Airlift days. She is a genuine veteran, and one that would make her mark on the city again, nearly 60 years after she first landed there.
Flying almost consistently due east for four and a half hours, after departure from Coventry's 05/23 runway, brings you to Berlin. Travelling mostly at 2,500 to 3,000ft, which gives passengers a somewhat bumpy ride in a strong wind, the opportunity to view a broad swathe of northern Europe so closely, and visit Tempelhof before its closure, was too good to miss for the two dozen or so enthusiasts who set out in G-AMPY on 20 June 2008.

Air Atlantique's DC-3 KK116/G-AMPY on final approach to Runway 27 Left at Tempelhof, past the blocks of flats that provide the backdrop to so many classic Tempelhof photos.PHOTO:Ben Dunnell

The view from the Air Atlantique Dakota before it turned finals into Tempelhof.PHOTO:David Halford

Air Service Berlin's DC-3 was based at Tempelhof until the airport closed on 30 October 2008.PHOTO:David Halford

Passing near Corby and Peterborough, the route eastwards passes over large swathes of unspoilt but carefully farmed countryside in East Anglia. The landscape was created in large measure by drainage systems introduced by Dutch engineers from the 1630s onwards. The route also managed to produce some unscripted surprises, the outward leg crossing over the eastern threshold of RAF Lakenheath just as an F-15E Strike Eagle touched down beneath us, while another curved beneath our tail on long finals, and a flight of Eagles passed above us on the opposing vector. A chance encounter with a hail storm produced an alarming clatter on the exterior of the aircraft, like bursts of shrapnel that rippled back and forth for several minutes, before G-AMPY cleared the Suffolk coast just north of Lowestoft 55 minutes after take-off. The aircraft began to lose height slowly but perceptibly as it covered the 40 minutes to the Dutch coast, with the wind farms some miles off the coast coming ever nearer, before crossing over the long, semi-deserted beach north of the industrial and port city of IJmuiden. By this point we were down from 2,400ft to 1,200ft, to keep within the altitude restrictions imposed by Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport. From there it was a short 20-minute leg across the Markermeer — the southern part of the Zuider Zee — to Lelystad, home of the Aviodrome aviation museum. The approach from the east on was 'interesting', with an extensive wind farm and high tension electricity cables designed to concentrate the mind of any inexperienced pilot.
The DC-3 actually has legs to get to Berlin, and possibly just scrape back, without refuelling. We were well below the official maximum load of 3.5 metric tonnes, a limit that was sometimes stretched to 6 tonnes at the height of the Berlin Airlift, when the needs of the city were most acute. However, we passengers did not have such stamina, and to judge from the physical demands of keeping the aircraft on course, a break was welcome on the flight deck too, hence the stop at Lelystad. It seems that the Dakota is light on the elevators and heavy on the ailerons. Our second leg to Berlin was around 285 miles, and would take just over two hours.
Had things been resolved differently, and the confrontation between the West and the Warsaw Pact over Berlin turned into armed conflict, much of the route taken by the Dakota over the North German Plain would still be marked by destruction and desolation. With the first test of a Soviet atomic bomb over a year away when the Airlift began, the West still held the atomic ace, but decided that firm resolution over the blockading of Berlin was the best way to tackle the crisis. Europe had taken too much of a beating only three years before to want to unlearn recent lessons, and consign its citizens to further slaughter.
After the Soviets and their East German allies progressively cut off water, rail and finally road links with the city, leaving its 2.2 million citizens with a rapidly dwindling stock of foodstuffs and other essentials, the airlift started by the allies fed into Berlin along three 20-mile wide corridors from the north-west, west and south-west into the three West Berlin airfields — Gatow in the British sector, Tegel in the French sector and Tempelhof in the American one. G-AMPY's route was along the central air corridor that was used by flights from Hannover, Celle and other bases in the vicinity. We passed by Celle, one of the relatively few largish towns we encountered en route, its distinctive white-painted 16th century ducal palace rising above the Altstadt. The British have maintained a military presence, now much reduced, there since the end of WW2.
We crossed the Elbe just below Tangermünde, an historic town surrounded by almost perfectly preserved medieval brick walls, and with a large dock for river traffic. As it threaded its way across the state of Brandenburg (now part of Berlin-Brandenburg), the distinctive pattern of woods and lakes that make Berlin one of the greenest of cities appeared, much of the landscape due to glaciation in the last Ice Age. Frederick the Great's Sanssouci Palace in Potsdam was the last marker before entering former West Berlin airspace. In its airlift days, G-AMPY would have landed at RAF Gatow, to the west of the Havel lake and right up against the Soviet sector border. We pressed on instead to Tempelhof, the main focus of US relief efforts, scene in 1948-49 of an apparently unending stream of C-54 Skymasters landing and departing.
Tracking around to the east, Air Atlantique's chief pilot Jon Corley lined G-AMPY up above the characteristic rooftops that feature in so many Tempelhof photos. This time there were no crowds of small boys waiting for sweets or raisins to be thrown out by the crews — rather, just a few enthusiasts and locals on the spotters' mound provided by the 'Am Tower' child and parent centre, as we touched down on runway 27L on a glorious June evening.
The massive Tempelhof Airport building, at around 1,200 metres long still one of the world's largest buildings, was designed by Ernst Sagebiel, and built under Albert Speer's direction between 1936 and 1941. An awe-inspiring temple to German aviation, it dwarfed the Air Atlantique Dakota as she taxied in under the huge central canopy and swung around to align herself with Flygande Veteraner's DC-3 SE-CFP. Just along the ramp was D-CXXX, Air Service Berlin's 'Rosinenbomber' ('Raisin Bomber', or 'Candy Bomber' to Americans), a fellow RAF Berlin Airlift veteran as KN442. Dakota Norway's DC-3 LN-WND finally made it just before dusk, creating a four-strong line-up, though the group's one major regret would be the lack of an opportunity to look at them together on the ramp.
Despite the low-key approach to the event by the Berlin authorities, whose determination to close the airfield has caused much controversy, we were most hospitably received and generously entertained on two occasions by the Tempelhof Aviators who, with their fleet of mainly classic aircraft, were still based at the airport. A small seminar was also organised inside the Rotes Rathaus (formerly East Berlin's city hall, and now the seat of Berlin's mayor) by Stiftung Luftbrückendank (literally the 'Air Bridge Gratitude Foundation') which was followed by further hospitality, a level of generosity reflecting the very real affection felt by many in the city towards those who helped them in one of their darkest hours. This was also reflected in the financial help and support given by the city to the widows and families of those men who died during the airlift, an obligation that continues on a small scale to this day.
New EU legislation on flight deck security means that G-AMPY was within weeks of being withdrawn from pleasure flying. The costs of adapting cockpit access, and the further requirement for passenger-carrying historic aircraft to have a Certificate of Airworthiness of the same kind as that required for modern commercial types, have stacked the odds against it. Given these hurdles, and the fact that Britain's CAA does not currently believe that the EU's Article 8 operations exemption can be applied on an open-ended basis, the future for this aircraft is unclear though Air Atlantique will continue to display it at shows.
This grand old Dakota deserves better, and your correspondent's suggestion of a sortie over the Berlaymont building, the EU Commission's HQ in Brussels, to drop a million leaflets with two words: 'You b**tards!' did meet with some sympathy.
Acknowledgements: The author and Ian Allan Travel wish to thank Air Atlantique's Richard Parr, and pilots Jon Corley and Andy Simmons, for their help in the preparation of this article, and Nicole and Melanie for keeping us all well-fed and good-humoured.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Two stints working and studying in Berlin in 1967 and 1970 brought the Cold War into sharp focus for David Halford, but only in 2008 did he finally go inside Tempelhof Airport. The trip stirred memories of late nights at Checkpoint Charlie, joining actors from the Berliner Ensemble for the May Day parade through Alexanderplatz in front of GDR leader Walter Ulbricht, and coming very close to being machine-gunned by an East German gunboat while attempting night photography near the Potsdam Bridge. He has yet to discover what is on his old Stasi file.

Another Tempelhof visitor in salute to the Berlin Airlift was DC-3 SE-CFP from Sweden.PHOTO:Ben Dunnell

The Dakotas of Air Atlantique and Air Service Berlin, Airlift veterans both, under the Tempelhof 'canopy'.PHOTO:David Halford

The two Airlift veteran 'Daks' taxi for departure.PHOTO:Ben Dunnell

G-AMPY leaving Tempelhof for the last time.PHOTO:Ben Dunnell