Master of the Air: William Tunner and the Success of Military Airlift

11 / Rebellion

11 / Rebellion Maintenance seems prosaic; everyone changes the oil in their car. But it is also a necessity, since without it, machines stop running. Because of its critical role in keeping the airlift efficient, it causedTunner to take dramatic steps, sparking a rebellion that revealed just how single-minded a leader he really was, regardless of the rules surrounding the uniform he wore. It also led to his most epic struggle with authority, a prolonged battle with serious consequences for him. Maintenance, back in the days of the cowboy operation, was at times an improvised affair. On some occasions, to service the nose gear, personnel would move as many locals as they could to the rear of a C-54 till the plane tipped back onto its tail and permitted easy access to the front wheels.1 Tunner would have none of this. His first directive on this subject was the most important: maintenance schedules, the checks done every fifty, two hundred , one thousand hours of flight time, would now be followed scrupulously, no matter how many planes it took out of the air. Without this system, he understood, in time there would be no planes flying at all. One study showed that “the ‘aircraft in commission’ . . . figure has even more effect on tonnage into Berlin than the weather.” At the height of the airlift, with 354 planes assigned to it, only 128 were actually flying at any time.2 Part of the problem was the airlift’s enormous appetite for spare parts, as C54s flew more in a month than they would in a year of normal service. A stock of windshield wipers expected to last six months evaporated in two weeks. Tires became a scarce commodity as did brakes and spark plugs. Other items Rebellion / 187 became almost impossible to repair: high-tech radios, for example, clogged with coal dust and flour.3 Tunner’s team used their usual methods, instituting a new form which kept a detailed history of every plane, and publicizing ideas for improved procedures that again covered every detail from air compressors to auxiliary generators.4 Above all, he instituted the same assembly-line maintenance procedures he had pioneered during the Hump. Once again, there were no crew chiefs, but a series of stands where mechanics performed the same operations over and over again. The C-54s arriving for the 200-hour checkup came in covered with oil and grease, with black coal dust fused into the wood flooring. The first stage, therefore, was to wash down the plane with a chemical solution under fifty pounds of pressure, followed by a water rinse that came out of the hose twice as hard. Some parts of the interior were still hand brushed when all else failed to remove the grit, and as much as fifty pounds of sugar, macaroni, coal dust, and flour could be removed from under the cargo floor. Even worse was the grime collected on the top of the plane, which resembled lamp black and could not be washed off.To remove this powerful residue, engineers took a thirty-sixfoot -long de-icing cloth and rigged up a machine to run it across the upper part of the fuselage like a giant shoe-shine rag. Overall, getting the plane as clean as possible became a six-hour operation involving sixteen men.5 This was only the first stage. After that the craft moved to platforms where mechanics ran up the engine and performed diagnostic tests, basically writing the game plan for the rest of the inspection. From there the C-54 went through stages where experts repaired different systems, such as electronics or hydraulics , and then on to the sixth form where everything was checked to make sure that the work had been done satisfactorily. But Tunner had hit a problem, in that there were not enough trained personnel to do the job. His staff had determined that to keep things going around the clock, they had to relentlessly maintain a crew of fifteen mechanics on every plane being overhauled, but as late as February 1949 only seven were assigned to the job.6 To make up the difference, he resorted to a strategy he had created back in Burma, to use locals to fill positions for the air force. As had happened in Asia, there were quite a few difficulties with this approach. The initial hurdle was a stiff one. Though Tunner overcame it with stealth and tact, it revealed the...