Up In The Airfest 2010-Part 6

Here's another of the planes from Airfest 2010 that I saw this past Saturday. This is a C-54 that was used by the US during the Berlin Airlift. After the Communists clamped down on transportation between free Germany and the Western controlled parts of Berlin, the United States had to provide the city with everything it needed from food to fuel for over a year. One of the bits of trivia they mentioned during the presentation was the fact that the runway in Berlin was seeing so much use, a plane was landing every three minutes. If a pilot missed his first approach, he didn't get a chance to come around and try again. He was sent back to his home airfield.

Another little bit of trivia mentioned was the story of the chocolate bars. One of the pilots dropped a chocolate bar from the window of his plane one day when he saw a few youngsters waving at the end of the runway. He tied his handkerchief to it to act as a makeshift parachute. On his next flight, he saw more youngsters and tried to drop more candy. Eventually, it turned into a regular flight dropping hundreds of candy bars at a time. Look close at the pictures above and below, and you'll see a small white parachute as they recreate this little bit of history.