Tempelhof Kaput? -- say it isn't so!

I read an article (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/arts/design/20tempelhof.html?pagewanted=1) in the New York Times the other day that made me very sad -- The Berliners are trying to close Tempelhof Airport -- the Berlin Airlift airport, the turf of the immortal Candy Bomber. A big chunk of history stands to be lost here -- not just world history, but my own personal history. I lived at Tempelhof -- in the actual Hitler-built airport building -- for the three and a half years (1973-1977) that I was stationed with the 6912th Security Squadron, USAF, in what was then West Berlin.

Imagine spending almost 20 hours in the air flying from Lubbock to Dallas, to New York, to Gatwick-London, to Frankfurt, (west) Germany and FINALLY to reach your destination -- the famous Divided City. I still vividly remember the landing. As you can see, Tempelhof is literally right smack dab in the middle of the city -- As you descend and make the turn that puts you on final approach, you can't even see the runway out your window -- it's so teeny -- all you can see is streets and streets of buildings. It looks like you are going to land right in the middle of a bunch of apartment blocks. The landing lights that mark the end of the runway are indeed just outside the walls of a cemetary -- the plane is about 30 feet off the ground and you look out your window and there's all these gravestones right underneath you!!! You can't even see the runway until you are only seconds from touchdown. I was still in the throes of quite a hefty adrenalin rush as we were taxiing up to the terminal, when I looked out my window and there in the grass between the runway and the taxi way was a guy, a dog and about 40 head of quietly grazing sheep -- not only right in the middle of downtown Berlin, but in the middle of a working airport! I thought, Lord have mercy! What have I gotten myself into now?

It was actually a piece of cake to land those blue and white Pan Am 727's on that postage stamp of a runway (The 727's were referred to as "tricycles" because of their three jet engines -- one on each wing and one on the tail). What was mindblowing was watching a C5A land on that little postage stamp of a runway -- those things are gy-normous! -- Their manufacturer designation was C-5A Galaxy -- "big gals" - Their wings were so wide (200+feet) about 15 feet of wing was hanging off the runway on each side.The difference in height between the wingtip and the ground when it is empty of fuel and when it is fully fueled is 16 feet!! (The pix to the left was not taken at Tempelhof -- I chose it because it has people for scale to show how big those "gals" were!) We could always tell when one had landed. The whole building would vibrate because they just taxied them around to the hangar aprons -- right next door, actually -- parked them, popped the nose open and unloaded them without even shutting the engines off. We'd get off the (Mercedes Benz!) bus from work, walk into the building, feel the floor vibrating, and invariably somebody would say "Mama's home. . ." -- It was more cost/fuel efficient to just throttle those huge jet engines back and let them idle rather than turn them off and then have to restart them and warm them back up again -- because while they were unloading our stuff, they were refueling the plane, and once they were done, they'd just shut the nose doors, taxi them back around onto the runway and off they went. The C5's would get onto the runway, get lined up, hit full throttle and about 3/4 of the way down the runway, those jet jocks would yank the nose up and they would just lift off the runway and climb with this incredible, jaw-dropping slowness up into the air -- Watching the C5-s doing their slow-mo climb used to remind me of a family vacation we had once when my family and our church friends the Turner family went camping in the mountains of northeastern New Mexico-- and it took two tries to get our fully loaded little four-seater Triumph Herald Sedan (AKA "The Little Red Car" ) up this one particularly steep grade on this dirt road way the heck out in the middle of the inutterable boonies and my dad kept rocking forward in his seat as if he could add some extra momentum to help us up the hill. . . .it was hysterical.

My favorite, though, were the C130's (Hercules) They were turbo props. They have four engines, but the airframe is so airworthy, I've heard it said you can take it off with two engines, fly it with one, but it takes all four to land it, because it's harder to get them OUT of the air than it is to get them airborne in the first place. They'd get just over the end of the runway, hit full reverse on their engines to kill as much forward momentum as they could then cut the throttles back all the way so that they would literally fall out of the air for that last 10 feet ("the Herky-jerk") before their tires would whump down onto the runway -- then they'd have to speed the engines up so they could taxi! There were two black stripes on that runway, one of them that started about 50 feet from the landing lights by the cemetary wall and extended for about 150 feet, which was rubber from the plane tires slamming on the brakes and another about 200 feet long at the other end of the airway that was soot from the jet engines -- that was where they'd pull the nose up to about 45 degrees and pedal like crazy to get those big mommas airborne!

Here is an arial plan of the airport. The USAF had the left-hand side of that great curve of hangar (c). That whole shaded area under "c" on that side was "barracks" -- I lived in the stretch between the second and third "bump" from the "wingtip." for a while and had windows that looked out on Columbiadamm, the street that goes down that side of the airport. Then I moved down into that little "hook" at the very tip. My room's windows looked down onto the inside of a hanger that was about 4 stories tall. All of the building to the left of "b" -- which was actually the Pan Am terminal, was a USAF base. I had to walk the whole length of that "wing" to get anywhere on base -- to the mess hall, to the AAFES store, to the AAFES bank, to the enlisted club, to the main gate to get on the base bus to go to work or to go off base, quite a hike! It was another block and a half to the nearest U-Bahn (subway) station!

What a bummer that they want to doze the grand old pile. Granted, it does occupy a great deal of down-town real estate, but still . . . it's a piece of world history. . . not to mention my own personal history. . . . sigh! It was another time, (35 years ago -- ye gods!) another place (a whole 'nother world, in fact!), and I was another person then -- Sgt. Zelda Zombie of the Zoomies, in fact -- a World War III (Cold War) Flying Ace -- I even had a "secret identity" -- Natasha of the Steppes. Right at the entrance to Tempelhof (a) is the Luftbrücke (the "air bridge" -- the memorial to the Berlin Airlift) -- It's circular and several streets radiated off it like wheel spokes. One of those streets was Manfred von Richthofen Strasse (Manfred von Richthofen was the Red Baron), and on the corner of that street was a bar called "Snoopy's" -- no joke. I doubt it's there any more. . . . like so much else that isn't there any more, including me. . . . So here I am mooning over things that happend half a world a way, and 35 years ago, and on my way home from visiting my folks, I'm stopping off at Sutherlands to get potting soil so I can repot my pet tree Phred, who turned 27 last Christmas, BTW, and the kid who checks me out was born in 1990 -- now that's downright depressing. . . . . .