This Date in Aviation History: June 26 - June 28

"ttyymmnn" (ttyymmnn) 06/28/2019 at 12:35 • Filed to: wingspan, Planelopnik, TDIAH

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Welcome to This Date in Aviation History , getting of you caught up on milestones, important historical events and people in aviation from June 26 through June 28.

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Residents of West Berlin watch as a US Air Force Douglas C-54 Skymaster lands at Tempelhof Airport. (US Air Force)

June 26, 1948 – The Berlin Airlift begins. Following the D-Day landings in France on June 6, 1944, Germany found itself squeezed on two fronts. The Allies were methodically pushing eastward on a broad front throughout Europe, while the Russians were racing westward at a breakneck pace to reach the German capital ahead of the Western Allies. Berlin fell to the Russians on May 2, 1945 and, as had been decided at the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! held in February of that year, the German capital was divided into four occupation zones. The Russians controlled the eastern quarter of the city, while the remainder was divided between the French, British and Americans. The city itself was deep inside eastern Germany, which was fully controlled by the Russians.

Germany, divided after the war. Berlin, the German capital, lies deep in the Soviet-controlled eastern part of the country. (Author unknown)

Though the shooting war was over, the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! between the Western Bloc (the US and its European allies) and Russia had begun. The fragile wartime alliance between the West and the Soviet Union ended, and both sides sought to influence the political makeup of Europe and the rest of the world through economic and political policies and !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . On June 24, 1948, in an effort to make the city of Berlin entirely its own, Russia cut off the western sectors from the outside world, severing water connections and halting all vehicular and river traffic into or out of the Allied sectors. West Berlin was effectively cut off from the rest of Western Europe, and it became a democratic island inside Communist East Germany.

Using the three corridors for one-way traffic, American cargo aircraft departed from Wiesbaden and Rein-Main in the south, while British cargo aircraft departed from Fassberg and flew to RAF Gatow in southwest Berlin. (Author unknown)

But while the Russians could block all road, rail and water access to West Berlin, they could not put a roof over it, and the Western allies began the greatest airlift in history. Prior to the blockade, the Russians agreed to let the Western allies use three air corridors from western Germany into Berlin, and these corridors formed the supply routes. Starting haphazardly at first, the operation was taken over by US Brigadier General Joseph Smith, who had commanded !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! under General !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! during the war. But Smith had no airlift experience, and he was soon replaced by Major Gerneral !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , a veteran of airlift operations over the Himalayas during the fight against Japan. Tunner cobbled together an aerial armada of !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! and British C-47 Dakotas, !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! airliners, and !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! and started round-the-clock flights. Directed by radio beacons, the Americans flew loops into Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport, while the British flew a circuit through the RAF airfield at !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . Tunner instituted strict rules to streamline the operation, such as requiring !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! landings regardless of weather and the elimination of !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! while planes awaited landing. If an aircraft missed an approach, the crew was required to return to their starting point, fully laden, and try again. Tunner required air crews to stay with their planes at all times, and meals were brought out to the crews on the tarmac so they could take off immediately after unloading. Citizens of West Berlin pitched in to help unload the planes.

Fight crews celebrate the end of the Berlin Blockade (US Air Force)

By the end of August 1948, 1,500 flights per day—one landing every minute—delivered more than 5,000 tons of cargo, enough to keep the city fed and powered in spite of the Soviet blockade. And on Easter Sunday, 1949, the airlift managed to deliver 13,000 tons of cargo, including the equivalent of 600 railroad cars of coal. The airlift continued for 11 months, making more than 189,000 flights totaling nearly 600,000 hours of flying and amassing more than 92 million miles. In the face of this herculean effort, the Soviets finally relented and lifted the blockade one minute after midnight on May 12, 1949. West Berlin remained a free city, and it stood as an important symbol of the West’s resolve to fight the spread of Communism in Europe until the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! in 1990.

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(US Navy)

June 26, 1942 – The first flight of the Grumman F6F Hellcat. When the US Navy entered WWII, their primary carrier-based fighter was the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , a fighter that, while an all-metal monoplane, was still very much a product of an earlier era of fighters. It was only one generation removed from the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , the last biplane fighter to serve the Navy, and the Wildcat even shared the F3F’s hand-cranked landing gear. While the Wildcat did yeoman’s work in the early days of the war, it was completely outclassed by the excellent !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! that ruled the skies in the Pacific. Fortunately for the Navy, a successor was waiting in the wings, a fighter that had been undergoing development since 1938, and one that would prove every bit the match for the nimble Zero.

Grumman XF6F prototype (US Navy)

Soon after the Wildcat made its first flight on September 2, 1937, and even before it entered Navy service, Grumman started working on its successor. By June 1941, six months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a prototype was ready for testing. And while the Hellcat bore a significant resemblance to the Wildcat, it was in fact an entirely new aircraft. Gone was the hand-cranked landing gear, replaced by hydraulically actuated struts that folded fully into the wing. The wings were mounted closer to the bottom of the fuselage and could be hydraulically folded back for carrier storage. It was also five feet longer, had a greater wingspan, and outweighed the Wildcat by 3,000 pounds. But most importantly, it had a much more powerful engine.

As development of the Hellcat continued, Grumman got valuable input from pilots who had faced the Zero in combat. As a direct result of those meetings, the Hellcat’s original !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! radial, which produced 1,700 hp, was replaced with a !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! 18-cylinder radial capable of 2,200 hp, the same engine being used in the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! and !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . The new power plant gave the Hellcat a top speed of 391 mph compared to the Zero’s 332 mph. While the Zero was designed to be light and agile, it offered little to no protection for the pilot. Grumman, on the other hand, a company that earned its nickname “The Iron Works” for their reputation for building rugged aircraft, gave the Hellcat a bullet-resistant windscreen, 212 pounds of cockpit armor to protect the pilot, and self-sealing fuel tanks, weight increases that were offset by the more powerful engine. The Hellcat’s claws were six .50 caliber !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! machine guns mounted in the wings, and it could carry up to 4,000 pounds of bombs, rockets or torpedoes.

The F6F entered service in 1943, and despite the fact that it was slower than the Corsair, it was better suited to carrier operations. Therefore, the Hellcat became the standard US Navy fighter until the end of the war. When tested against a !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! A6M5 Zero, the Hellcat proved to be faster, could outturn the Japanese fighter at higher altitudes, and had a faster roll rate. The Zero was still a better dogfighter at lower altitudes, but American pilots learned to use the Hellcat’s weight and firepower to their advantage in diving attacks on Japanese fighters. The Fleet Air Arm (FAA) of the Royal Navy also flew the Hellcat, first called the Gannet, before switching back to the name Hellcat for simplicity. The 1,200 aircraft flown by the FAA served in Norway, the Mediterranean, and the Far East, but had far fewer opportunities to shoot down enemy fighters than their American counterparts in the Pacific. By the end of the war, Navy and Marine pilots calmed 5,163 victories over Japanese aircraft at a loss of 270 Hellcats, a ratio of 19:1 when taking into account both claimed and confirmed victories. There were no less than 305 pilots who became aces in the F6F.

Royal Navy Hellcats of No. 1840 Naval Air Squadron in 1944, likely flown by Dutch pilots. (Royal Navy)

After the war, Hellcats were used as second-line fighters behind the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , and also served as trainers and even as pilotless radio-controlled bombs during the Korean War. A night fighter variant flew for the US Navy until 1954, and the Hellcat also served as the original aircraft for the US Navy’s !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! flight demonstration team when the team was formed in 1946. Grumman turned out more than 12,000 Hellcats in three years of production, and the final Hellcats were retired from service with the Uruguayan Navy in 1960.

Remotely piloted F6Fs on the flight line at Bikini in 1946. These aircraft were flown through the radioactive cloud of atomic bomb tests. The different colored tails denote the radio frequency used to control them. (US Navy)

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Short Takeoff

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(Tim Shaffer)

June 26, 1974 – The first flight of the Eurocopter AS350 Écureuil ( Squirrel ), a single-engine light utility and transport helicopter developed by Aérospatiale as a replacement of the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . The Alouette’s initial successor, the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , was a success in the military market, so the Écureuil was directed at the civilian market, and steps were taken to keep the cost of the helicopter as low as possible. The production helicopter is powered by a !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! turboshaft engine which gives the Écureuil a cruising speed of 152 mph, and the helicopter has capacity for five passengers. Nearly 4,000 have been produced, and the Écureuil is operated all over the world and is particularly popular with civil authorities.

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(Author unknown)

June 26, 1936 – The first flight of the Focke-Wulf Fw 61, a tandem-rotor helicopter that is considered the first practical and functional helicopter. While !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! is known for his groundbreaking work with single-rotor helicopters, the Fw 61 used two counter-rotating, three-bladed rotors to provide lift, while lateral control was achieved by the use of cyclic pitch and asymmetric rotor lift. Torque was controlled through the counter-rotation of the rotors, and a small propeller at the front served only to cool the engine. Two were built, and one was !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! famously by !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! inside the Deutschlandhalle in 1938. The Fw 61 also set an unofficial altitude record of 11,234 feet in 1938.  

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(US Department of Defense)

June 27, 1976 – The hijacking of Air France Flight 139. Air France Flight 139, an !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! (F-BVGG), departed Tel Aviv, Israel carrying 246 passengers and flew to Athens, Greece where hijackers secretly boarded the plane along with other passengers. After departing for Paris, the hijackers took over the plane and flew it first to Libya, then Entebbe, Uganda. The hijackers demanded $5 million and the release of Palestinian militants, many of who were held in Israeli jails. On July 4, following unsuccessful negotiations, Israeli commandos stormed the airport where the hostages were being held and killed the hijackers, along with three hostages who were caught in the crossfire. One commando was killed by Ugandan soldiers as the hostages boarded planes to be flown out of the country.

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Connecting Flights

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If you enjoy these Aviation History posts, please let me know in the comments. And if you missed any of the past articles, you can find them all at !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . You can also find more stories about aviation, aviators and airplane oddities at !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! .

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Hamtractor > ttyymmnn 06/28/2019 at 13:00

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One thing left out of the Entebbe piece was that the last name of the Israeli commando killed was Netanyahu...

ttyymmnn > Hamtractor 06/28/2019 at 13:15

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Any relation?

Hamtractor > ttyymmnn 06/28/2019 at 13:41

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Yonatan Netanyahu, big brother to Benjamin.

user314 > ttyymmnn 06/28/2019 at 13:46

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Benjamin’s older brother .

ttyymmnn > user314 06/28/2019 at 14:45

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I figured, but didn’t know that. 

FastIndy > ttyymmnn 06/28/2019 at 15:09

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June 26th, 2002.  I soloed on my 16th birthday!  I’ve got a newspaper clipping rolling around here somewhere...

ttyymmnn > FastIndy 06/28/2019 at 15:12

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Congrats! 

TheRealBicycleBuck > ttyymmnn 06/28/2019 at 20:14

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Another great post. Hellcat all the things!

ttyymmnn > TheRealBicycleBuck 06/28/2019 at 20:37

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Thanks!

Only Vespas... > ttyymmnn 06/29/2019 at 20:35

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Again, another nice piece. Especially for the 4th weekend...commendable.

One thing. Pet Peeve Time: Use of the word Tarmac. Tarmac was a commercial product invented in 1902 . It was a mix of oil and gravel or tar to create temporary roads. Journalists for years have used Tarmac to describe the RAMP or APRON at airports. [ Any surface that is not a taxiway or runway. ] As a licensed pilot and an airline brat I have never heard any member of the aviation family use the word tarmac.  Journalists, yes.  Airport people no.   Just saying .

ttyymmnn > Only Vespas... 07/01/2019 at 16:40

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Thanks for reading, and thanks for the reply. I absolutely understand your argument , but I think that, while “tarmac” isn’t the precise word in the aviation world, it is a word that the casual reader will absolutely understand. They might understand “ramp,” but probably never “apron.” But pilots and ground crews are dealing with very specific positions on the field (such as ramp and apron) , but tarmac, for the layman, conjures up visions of a general airplane parking area off the runway. In fact, here in the US, I would wager that the general public only understands “tarmac” in its aviation connection, and not with the original road paving material that gave us the name.

Believe me, I’m a word guy, and I always strive for the correct wording when possible. However, clarity can be more important absolute correctness, and I always try in these posts to strike a balance between correct jargon or technical terms and clarity/readability.

Thanks again for reading, and please continue to pick nits and pet your peeves. I always appreciate the comments and corrections, and I have certainly learned a lot from the commentariat.