Airlift

The title of this article is ambiguous. A description of the two-part TV series can be found under The Airlift - Only the Sky Was Free .

Three air corridors during the Berlin Airlift

Evacuation of Vietnamese, April 29, 1975

The term airlift generally refers to a temporary air corridor to a specific geographic point. This results in an air pollution of goods or, less often, people. The facility is tied to a special purpose, so that the term only occurs in connection with the associated name of the military or civilian operation.

Common uses that lead to the establishment of an airlift are:

• Supply corridor for military troops in a boiler battle
• Supply corridor for larger disaster areas after natural disasters
• fast flying out of large populations from areas of conflict or humanitarian aid there
• rapid relocation of military units to a crisis area

history

Historically, the first airlifts were linked to the availability of a sufficiently large number of cargo aircraft (around the 1930s). With supply flights, instead of landing in the target area, the goods can also be dropped over the target area. In the case of evacuation measures, missing runways have to be compensated for by using helicopters, which, however, have a much smaller transport capacity.

The first significant airlift is considered to be that of the troops of the later dictator Francisco Franco at the start of the Spanish Civil War from July 28 to October 1936. With the support of National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy, 25,000 soldiers were flown over the Strait of Gibraltar in Ju 52 planes .

During the Second World War , military airlifts became a common tactic, also due to the availability of more powerful aircraft for air pollution .

Other historical airlifts were

• 1941/42: Supply of the German troops during the Demjansk Kesselschlacht (96,000 men)
• 1942: US airlift over " The Hump " to supply the Chinese troops (until 1945)
• 1943: Supply of the German troops in the Battle of Stalingrad (300,000 men)
• 1943 Supply of the German-Italian armed forces in Tunisia during the Tunisian campaign (250,000 men)
• April / May 1945: Manna and Chowhound operations begin; These were humanitarian military operations of the Allied Air Forces under the tolerance of the German occupying forces to rescue the starving Dutch population, the Royal Air Force supported by Australian, Canadian, New Zealand and Polish forces from April 29 to May 7 with food from heavy bombers over the parts dropped by the Netherlands, which suffered from the Hongerwinter . The United States Army Air Forces flew similar missions May 1 through May 8, Operation Chowhound . Since the supply flights alone would not be sufficient, the Allies and the German side also agreed to supply food with trucks in the Rhenen area (Operation Faust) and on the waterway to Rotterdam as part of an armistice.
• 1948: The Berlin Airlift for supplies during the Berlin blockade (until 1949)
• 1975: Removal via the US embassy in Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War
• 1975: Luanda - Lisbon airlift for the evacuation of 4,000 retornados a day (September 1975) before the outbreak of civil war in Angola before the country became independent from Portugal in the same year. A total of around 174,000 people were brought to Portugal from Angola and Mozambique via several airlifts.
• 1984: Evacuation of 8,000 Ethiopian Jews during a famine as part of Operation Moses
• 1992: Supply during the long siege of Sarajevo (until 1996)
• 1999: Galtür avalanche disaster - supply and evacuation
• 2004: 6,000 civilians evacuated from Ivory Coast
• 2010: Supply of the Great Ox Island in the Flensburg Fjord, cut off from the ice
• 2020: As part of the COVID-19 pandemic be Called COVID-19 recall campaign by the German government ; with more than 240,000 people brought back, the largest return campaign in German history .

Web links

Wiktionary: Airlift  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

• UN airlift to Somalia started ( Memento from February 13, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) on tagesschau.de
• The Berlin Airlift Feature on Bayern2 Radio Knowledge (MP3)

Footnotes

1. ↑ According to another source, there were around 14,000 Foreign Legionnaires and 500 tons of material: Hugh Thomas: Der Spanish Civil War , Ullstein, Berlin 1962, p. 194. See also German-Spanish relations 1933-39
2. ^ "Airlift": Ox islands in the ice: Airplane brings supplies. In: shz.de. February 11, 2010, accessed May 10, 2015 . 
3. ↑ Irene Helmes, Katja Schnitzler, Eva Dignös: Coronavirus: How vacationers come home again. Retrieved April 25, 2020 .