Command and Control of the Civilian Contractors
Although General Tunner encountered some resistance to his methods from his direct superiors in Germany, his problems pale beside the difficulties the British faced in controlling the civilian contractors on which they were dependent for some critical aspects of the Airlift, notably liquid fuel deliveries. As the civilian effort grew, it became more chaotic, until it started to hamper rather than help the Airlift. (Below one of the more famous civilian fliers on the Airlift: Freddie Laker)
The problems of controlling an operation that was ultimately to encompass 27 different civilian companies started with the absurd fact that the Foreign Office (!) signed their contracts. These contracts (not surprisingly given the fact that they were drafted by civil servants with no expertise in managing air operations of any kind) did not establish any minimum standards for aircrew training, qualifications, crew ratios, maintenance scheduling, spare-parts depots etc. etc. etc. The contracts did, however, give the Foreign Office the right to cancel contracts on one week’s notice – thereby completely discouraging any would be contractor from making a significant investment in any of the above. This one seemingly minor feature of a bureaucratic product is perhaps the best indicator of how utterly convinced the Foreign Office was that the “Berlin Crisis” would be of short duration!
At all events, The Foreign Office gave contracts to more than a score of small charter companies and designated the British European Airways (BEA) as the “managing agent” for the civil airlift. The idea was that the BEA manager in Germany, Mr. E. P. Whitfield, would work together with the RAF and through his staff to co-ordinate the civil airlift – in addition to his regular duties of managing BEA’s Airlift operations and its scheduled passenger services between London and Berlin via Hamburg. However, when Mr. Whitfield and the first civilian companies arrived in Wunstorf, they discovered that no instructions had been given to the RAF about what role they were to play or how their operations were to be integrated into the British Airlift. There was no accommodation available for the civilians, no hangars and no workshops. In fact, nobody seemed to have the faintest idea of what was going on.
Furthermore, “no one had thought to tell the civilian companies that [Mr. Whitfield] was responsible for running the civilian side of the airlift. They regarded Whitfield as an interfering busybody.”[i] In fact, they ignored him for the most part, and Mr. Whitfield discovered that the Foreign Office with its notions of his position was very far away. His control over the civilian companies was theoretical only and the civilian companies more or less did as they pleased.
The civilian companies were, furthermore, on the whole “sky tramps” – companies formed by “enthusiastic young men who had survived the war and scraped together every penny to purchase surplus aircraft”[ii] usually just as a means to keep flying. Jobs in aviation were few and far between in the post-war years compared to the number of qualified pilots the air forces had produced, and so these charter companies had sprung up. The experiences of Victor Bingham are typical:
During that period of 1945-1949 many British civil aviation companies were forming and going bankrupt every month, and so one moved from one company to another – and the pay and conditions were awful – but we wanted to stay in aviation – and so we carried on, mainly flying civil versions of the Halifax and Lancaster bombers, with a few flying Dakotas.[iii]
I was living just outside London, and the company I
was flying for went ‘broke’, but after a couple of weeks I got a job flying
from Liverpool to Northern Ireland and back to bring back milk in churns as
there was a shortage of milk in northern England. Then the Berlin Airlift
started, which meant for both the company and ourselves regular paid work.[iv]
The charter companies were happy to have the Airlift contract, but as
the contract did not specify any minimum standards they simply brought along
what they had. The type of aircraft varied from the Hythe flying boats of
Aquila Airways (manned entirely by former Coastal Command aircrew) to converted
Liberators and rundown Dakotas, Yorks, Haltons and the infamous Tudors. (Below a Wellington)
These aircraft, depending on the number of hours flown and the maintenance they had received had very different cruising speeds, different optimal altitudes, and different load factors. None had radios which could communicate with the RAF and air traffic control, so these had to be provided by the RAF. Even the Dakotas that should have fit easily into RAF Dakota operations had a Certificate of Airworthiness issued by Air Ministry which rated them safe only for smaller loads than the RAF was then carrying on its Dakotas. As the army doing the loading could not cope with two different loads for identical aircraft and the objective was to fly in as much cargo as possible, an application to the Ministry had to be filed immediately to enable the civilian Dakotas to carry standard RAF loads. This approval arrived Aug. 15, 1948.
But the problems did not end there. For a start most of these companies did not have sufficient aircrew for “round-the-clock” operations. In fact, on average the civilian companies had only 1.3 crews per aircraft. That meant that even if they had wanted to, the civil aviation companies could not keep their aircraft flying around the clock. There is a natural tendency for men to want to sleep at night, and so the civilian companies quite naturally tended to do their flying during daylight – a tendency reinforced by the higher demands on pilot competence in darkness and the fact that not all civilian crews were certified for night flying. That left the RAF with the task of filling the night slots.
But even flying only by daylight in August entailed a good deal of flying, and the civilian companies – whether motivated by altruism, enthusiasm or profit – flew with great keenness when they started on the airlift – only to soon exhaust themselves. “A high intensity of operations over a few days was invariably followed by a slump because many of the aircraft were undergoing inspection and maintenance at the same time.”[v] Another problem was crews going on a binge after an intense period of flying and needing to sleep it off.
These scheduling problems were compounded by the fact that many of the smaller charter companies did not have large administrative staffs. They had not needed them before. Even if they had some kind of office manager, they rarely sent him off to Germany as soon as the Airlift contract was signed. Rather the senior captain was generally burdened with all administrative duties “in theatre” – but he was too busy flying to do anything else.
As for maintenance, none of these companies had maintenance facilities in Germany. When a problem came up that the crew could not handle, the first instinct was to get the RAF to deal with it, and only if that didn’t work did they send the aircraft back to the home base in the UK for servicing – and so loose the desperately needed revenue. The same went for spare parts, hangar space, workshop facilities and accommodations; the civilians generally looked to the RAF to solve all their problems more-or-less without compensation. Friction was largely avoided simply because civil fliers were almost all ex-RAF and often knew the men they were dealing with personally, and the RAF was dependent on the additional aircraft and crews and wanted “Plainfare” to succeed. But it still amounted to a haphazard, uncoordinated effort without clear command and control structures – or at any rate without one that anyone was respecting.
As exhaustion set in among the civilian crews and maintenance problems mounted on their aircraft, the performance of the civilian component of the airlift started to slip significantly. At the same time, the military component was being made increasingly efficient as a result of the effective and unified command and control structures going into place. When Tunner assumed command of the Combined Airlift Task Force in mid-October, the entire Airlift was on its way to becoming a highly regimented and to a large extent an assembly-line-like operation. Increasing specialization of cargoes by aircraft and bases was being put into effect, and the demands on flying discipline were increasing.
In this environment, the individualistic civilian flyers with their tendency to fly when and how they pleased, “yo-yoing in the corridors to avoid cloud or turbulence and scaring the living daylights out of RAF pilots trying to keep to a steady altitude,”[vi] increasingly became a problem rather than a solution. Until they were brought more under somebody’s control, they remained a wild-card in the entire operation. As a BAFO memo put it:
[Civilian] serviceability varies from day to day, the
number of sorties which they are ready and able to undertake also varies, and
their total daily is unpredictable for planning purposes.
The RAF viewed the situation as so critical that there was consideration given to requisitioning the civilian aircraft and putting service crews into them – or re-activating the crews and putting them under military discipline. In the end a far better solution was found. The various government departments involved in the civil airlift finally got a committee together that hammered out a new policy including placing all civilian companies under a unified command and, above all, putting the civilian lift on the same long-term basis as the RAF lift.
This entailed a number of adjustments. First, it was decided to restrict the types of aircraft flying the Airlift to make it easier for blocks to maintain timing and spacing. Secondly, to improve morale, housing was provided in hotels in Hamburg while construction began on accommodation blocks at the airfields that would give pilots single rooms and ground crews double rooms. More importantly, new contracts stipulated a minimum standard of two crews per aircraft and also set measurable minimum servicing standards. Last but not least, BA’s Senior Representative, who had long been nominally in charge, was now not only freed of all other duties so he could devote himself to running the civil airlift, he was also given the means to control his wayward sheep: the power to conclude or take away contracts.
The need to weed out companies that couldn’t or wouldn’t pull their
weight was critical to the success of the civil airlift. Now, at last, poorly
performing companies were sacked and some of the smaller operators disappeared
from the Airlift. Other companies were given the ultimatum to convert their
operations to tankers or loose their contracts. Meanwhile the better companies
got proper contracts with three-month notice periods and bonuses for better
performance thereby encouraging both investment and better administration and
management. (Below the all-important tankers.)
The results were felt almost at once. Companies like Flight Refuelling and Lancashire Aircraft Corporation restructured their operations and ramped up their maintenance organisation. Flight Refuelling, for example, hired a new executive for Germany, W/C Johnson, who set about throwing out the bad crews and the drunks, establishing strict rules – and enforcing them. He also engaged between 8 wireless fitters and ensured that ground staff worked 12 hour shifts with one day off per week and one week off every month. Trips home to the UK were paid at company expense. The ground crews, like the aircrews, were almost all ex-RAF, and they responded well to the new routine. Lancashire Aircraft Corporation was also able to do all the maintenance, installation of navigational equipment and conversion to tankers at its own workshops in England. Now that the contract allowed for long-term planning, the company could engage 16 fully trained aircrews and roughly 100 ground engineers, all based in Germany, to keep its fleet of 13 tankers operating. And it did.
Already in March the number of sorties flown by civilian aircraft on the Airlift increased from 54 to 70 per day, and the number of flights continued to increase until June 1949 when, after the lifting of the Blockade, the Airlift peaked and started to wind down. In the period between January and June 1949 the civil airlift was extremely well run and efficient. Leonard Vincent Knowles, a wireless fitter, who worked on the Airlift with the RAF until December 1948 and thereafter with Flight Refuelling, claims that by April 1949 there were clear schedules in four hour cycles that enabled every aircraft to make six flights to Berlin in every 24 hour period. There were workshops “purpose built” for the Lift. Accommodations in hotels in Hamburg were first rate. Last but not least, due to the discipline introduced by W/C Johnson, anyone responsible for a flight getting cancelled – whether it was a pilot due to drunkenness or a fitter who overlooked something in a Daily Inspection that resulted in unservicability - was subject to instant dismissal. Knowles noted that although he didn’t hear of anyone actually getting the sack, a new pride in accomplishment - even competition - for punctuality and the best serviceability records ensued. The civil airlift had been turned around to the benefit of all. Such is power of good command and control. (Below one of the Halifax freighters that replaced the Sunderlands and the salt-carriers on the Airlift."
[i] Robert Rodrigo, Berlin Airlift, Cassel, 1960, p. 50.
[ii] Robert Jackson, Berlin Airlift, Patrick Stephens, 1988, p. 100.
[iii] Victor Bingham, letter to the author, Sept. 2005.
[iv] Victor Bingham, letter to the author, Sept. 2005.
[v] Jackson, p. 115.
[vi] Ann and John Tusa, The Berlin Airlift, Sarpedon, 1988, p. 236.
NOTE: The content of this blog post is based on Helena P. Schrader. The Blockade Breakers. Pen & Sword, 2008
The Berlin Airlift is the subject of Bridge to Tomorrow, a trilogy of novels starting with Cold Peace.
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