Feeding a City From the Sky
in 1948-49 a blockaded city of two million was kept alive entirely by air, solved not by force but by a precision air-bridge: rigid scheduling, one landing attempt per plane, a plane every ~90 seconds, coal, a new airport in 90 days, and candy on parachutes.
Midnight, 1948. A cargo plane lands in a blockaded city, and another is ninety seconds behind it.
West Berlin had been cut off. Every road, rail and canal sealed by the Soviet blockade, about two million people inside with roughly a month of food and winter coming. You could not force your way in with an armed convoy without risking another war. So the Western allies asked a stranger question: could you feed an entire city from the sky?
The first weeks were chaos. Planes stacked up over the city, missed their approaches, and nearly collided. Then General William Tunner rewrote the rules. Every aircraft flew the same speed and the same height. Each got one straight-in shot at the runway, and if a pilot missed, he flew all the way back to base still fully loaded rather than circle and clog the pattern. Crews never left their aircraft.
It worked. At the peak a plane touched down roughly every ninety seconds, day and night. They flew in food, then coal for heat, which became the largest cargo of all, and they built a whole new airport, Tegel, in about ninety days. One pilot, Gail Halvorsen, even began dropping candy on little handkerchief parachutes for the children watching below.
Eleven months. Around two and a half million tons. A city of two million kept alive entirely from the air, until the blockade was lifted in May 1949.
Verdict: NOT BS. They did not break the blockade. They out-organised it.
The receipts are at bskiller.com/reels.
Sources: US Air Force (National Museum of the USAF), Truman Library, Britannica, Smithsonian.
Every claim in the film, checked against the record.
The full receipts — every claim, every source, checked against the record — are for BSKiller members. That is the whole point of the show: the receipts.