At Tempelhof, in the American sector of Berlin, the rhythm of the blockade became audible. At the April 1949 peak, a C-54 Skymaster was touching down on the short runway every sixty-two seconds. The Anglo-American airlift, running from June 26, 1948, to September 30, 1949, delivered roughly 2.3 million tons of food, coal, and medicine to the 2.5 million people of West Berlin after the Soviet Union had cut every land route into the city.
The operation had two codenames. The American half was Operation Vittles; the British, with their own aircraft and crews, called theirs Operation Plainfare. Both ran in parallel, sharing the airspace around Berlin under a careful time-slot system negotiated in the Berlin Air Safety Center.
Two airfields handled almost all the traffic. Tempelhof, in the American sector, was the famous one — short runways, surrounded by apartment blocks, and visible to everyone who lived nearby. Gatow, in the British sector, served the RAF’s Yorks and Hastings. A third field, Tegel, was built from scratch inside the American sector during the crisis and opened in November 1948, relieving pressure on Tempelhof within weeks.
The aircraft did the heavy lifting. The C-47 Skytrain (military DC-3) carried about 3.5 tons per trip. The C-54 Skymaster (military DC-4) carried about ten tons and became the workhorse once it entered service in numbers. The British contributed Avro Yorks and Handley Page Hastings. Maintenance, fueling, and crew rotation were handled in three West German hubs — Fassberg, Wunstorf, and Rhein-Main — that fed the Berlin corridors in a continuous shuttle.
The airlift was not just technically impressive; it was politically decisive. The Soviets had calculated that the West would not sustain the effort. The airlift proved them wrong, and Stalin lifted the blockade on May 12, 1949. For the wider crisis that produced the airlift, and the later wall that closed the border by land, see the linked treatments.