Gail Halvorsen

You're, you're kind of the, the candy ...

Well, I'm not gonna say that, but you're the Gail Halvorsen of the, uh, airlines.

[laughs]

[laughs] So-

It is two in the morning, summer of 1948, and a young first lieutenant named Gail Halvorsen is sitting on the flight deck of a C-54 Skymaster somewhere between Rhein-Main Air Base and the rubble of a city that half the world is trying to strangle.

Outside the windscreen, there is nothing but black sky and the glow of engine exhaust off the nacelles below him.

Somewhere in that dark is Germany.

And into this precisely calibrated, relentlessly driven machine, a young transport pilot from Garland, Utah, introduced an entirely unauthorized payload.

Gail Halvorsen arrived in Germany in the summer of 1948.

He was flying the airlift like every other crew member, learning the Tempelhof approach, getting the rhythm of the operation into his bones.

One afternoon he had some unscheduled time and he wandered over to the perimeter fence at Tempelhof.

By the time it concluded, Operation Vittles and Operation Plainfair together had flown over 200,000 sorties and delivered more than 2.3 million tons of supplies.

2.3 million tons, flown in, to a city surrounded on all sides, flight by flight, three minutes at a time.

Gail Halvorsen went on to a full Air Force career and retired as a colonel.

He returned to Berlin many times over the decades.

They were carrying coal, they were carrying flour, they were carrying medicine and dried potatoes and newsprint, and the disassembled components of a power generating station that the engineers put back together on the Berlin side, bolt by bolt.

Gail Halvorsen was 27 years old.

He was flying C-54s out of Rhein-Main Air Base near Frankfurt.

He had already done a tour flying supplies into South America, so he knew the airplane.

He broke the gum in half.

The rest of it, the handkerchief parachutes, the wing waggling, the Operation Little Vittles, all of it grew from that one small decision made at a wire fence on a warm July afternoon.

Gail Halvorsen went on to have a long Air Force career.

He retired as a colonel.

The children of Berlin called him Uncle Wackleflugel.

Uncle Wiggly Wings, Gail Halvorsen lived to be 101 years old, he passed away in February of 2022, and into his 90s he was still doing candy drops at air shows, still making handkerchief parachutes and dropping them from small aircraft to crowds of children who may not have known the history but understood something genuine was happening overhead.

He said once that the most important thing he ever did with an airplane had nothing to do with any logbook entry.

I believe him.