The Berlin Airlift remains to this day the largest and most successful airlift in history. There have been many airlifts in the 80 years since the Berlin Airlift ended,  but none has come near to the scale of joint USAF/RAF effort in 1948-1949. On the contrary, not all of them together carried as much as the Berlin Airlift alone. So just what were the logistical achievements of the Berlin Airlift? Below is a short summery of the numbers. Tonnage : The most common way of measuring the accomplishments of the Airlift is the one Tunner favored: tonnage. During the first five days of the Airlift, June 1948, the Allies managed to fly in 1,274 tones in 500 flights – and were proud of it. By the end of the Airlift, they were routinely flying seven times that much each day . Or put another way: the daily tonnage improved 40-fold in the course of the Airlift. On the Airlift’s best day, Tunner’s “Easter Parade,” the 12,940 tons flown into Berlin corresponded to roughly 22 freight trains ea