First Berlin Airlift crash, 1948
Published: February 29, 2012
©Stars and Stripes
Wiesbaden, Germany, July 6, 1948: Minus an propeller and trailing hay from its damaged fuselage, a C47 transport sits in a field after an accident on its way back from delivering food to Berlin. The pilots escaped with minor injuries after the plane grazed some trees and crashed as it approached the Wiesbaden airfield in bad weather. It was the first crash in the Berlin airlift, but by no means the last; by the time the effort to overcome the Soviet blockade of the city's Western section ended in September, 1949, 31 American and 39 British participants had been killed. However, the airlift's 278,228 flights succeeded in bringing 2,326,406 short tons of cargo into Berlin.
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A story about the 1948 Berlin airlift crash.
