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10 / Finding Solutions Tunner saw immediately, knew on an intuitive level, that in order to make the Berlin Airlift work—to make airlift work—he could not just improve the system. Instead, he had to totally remake military air transportation, make it different from what anyone else had ever conceived, along lines he had pioneered on the Hump. In Berlin, Tunner was not just trying to feed a city; he was attempting to prove a holy grail existed, that airlift was a strategic necessity in the modern era. The key to his approach, as Ross Milton put it, “was basically discipline.” This started at the top; Tunner himself, in the words of Dorothy Towne, had “great personal discipline” and “was always well groomed. . . . I imagine when he lived in a tent in Burma he was very well groomed.”1 Tunner saw the airlift as a business operation, and his whole approach was to impose the most methodical corporate procedures he could adapt to the situation . Daniel Harrington, an air force historian, insightfully wrote, “The airlift ’s goals were humanitarian, but Tunner’s methods were—because they had to be—ruthlessly mechanical.” Towne observed that Tunner “was thinking in terms of running a factory, like a production line,” and airlift vet Charles Ernst recalled that his boss “wouldn’t tolerate anything but perfection.”2 Like all great corporate innovators, his great ally was data.Time-motion engineers checked and calculated every aspect of the airlift; Red Foreman’s widow explained that her husband used to go out with a stopwatch to make sure that planes were taking off and landing when they should, down to the minute.3 Ground zero for all data was the charts room. Tunner set aside one space 160 / Finding Solutions just for all his charts—more than fifty—providing every kind of data possible , from missions flown to unloading times at every airport to maintenance breakdowns. These tables did not sit in fancy binders waiting for inspection, either; they were tacked to the wall so thatTunner could walk around and analyze everything, grasp everything within the time it took him to cover that one room. These were not only maintained on a 24/7 basis, they were updated every hour; one account by a reporter noted how he walked in at 3:40 one afternoon , and the latest information had just been posted at 3:30 sharp. Milton remarked , “We had all these charts around the room . . . and he knew what each of one of them meant. He used to come in and study these stat charts every day.” If any number was dropped or seemed off, Tunner brought it up with staff.That image of a leader very much in charge of the operation was typical at that time in, say, the automobile industry, but this became the first example of its kind in the history of military air transport. Milton added that Tunner had incorporated into his thinking a lot of knowledge from commercial airlines, all kinds of procedures and concepts that were “something new because none of us had ever heard of aircraft utilization and commercial charges.” Tunner, he concluded, was “very modern . . . quite ahead of his time.”4 Everything came under scrutiny. Before, two planes could fly vastly different distances carrying the same tank of gas. Now, calculations took into account speed, load, altitude, wind, outside temperature, and as a result officers could figure out practically to the mile how far a plane could go with a specific load under a given set of conditions. Refueling time was also cut, from thirtythree minutes to only eight. Planes that missed their scheduled departure— one account claimed this was regulated to the second—moved back in line and waited for holes deliberately inserted into the traffic flow to accommodate such screwups and to keep load rates as high as possible. As early as October 1948, a few months after Tunner took over, Newsweek reported that the airlift “is Big Business, organized and operated with typical American commercial efficiency .” Gatow, in the British sector, became the busiest airport in the world, handling three times the planes and cargo of the next biggest, LaGuardia in New York City.5 Red tape became the enemy of efficiency, so military procedures got streamlined . This may have ruffled feathers among the higher-ups, may have gotten Tunner into trouble with superiors, but in Germany, those issues did not matter. Instead, the Encyclopedia Britannica’s online edition now cites the...

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