Burtonwood
Gen
Tunner saw a major problem with maintenance, the added German mechanics had
been a huge boost, work was going along efficiently with the servicing of
aircraft at “Oberpfaffehofen.”It had worked well as an expedient maintenance
facility in the summer and early autumn.
However, if the airlift were to go on into the winter, Oberpfaffenhofen
was totally unsuited for its function.
It had insufficient indoor areas in which to work on aircraft, and
indoor work space in the winter was essential.
Looking about Europe Tunner’s staff came upon the RAF base at
Burtonwood, just north of Liverpool. A
huge depot, it had a perimeter of over seventy miles and had, during the war
housed 30,000, British and American airmen.
Now it was nearly deserted and used only for “pickling” obsolete RAF
planes. Most of the windows on the
base were broken, the roofs sagged and leaked, and much of the equipment had
been ruined through neglect. However
Burtonwood offered enclosures where the water used to clean the planes would
not freeze and where maintenance crews could work in relative comfort while
they carried out the vital 200 hour inspections.
By the time the military governors met in
Berlin for the second time since the Moscow talks, the base at Burtonwood had
been reactivated. Twenty five hundred
airmen, mostly from Griffis Air Force Base in Rome, NY, were on their way to
Burtonwood to man it. Even this number
of mechanics and technicians would not be enough to handle the maintenance
demands of the two-hundred hour checks on airlift planes. Tunner was forced to detail mechanics from
his own squadrons to fill out the compliment at Burtonwood. In return, he received a promise that the
new maintenance depot would perform the required work at a rate of seven planes
per day once it became fully operational.
Tunner
provided the personnel and permitted the transfer of two hundred hour checks to
Burtonwood, under USAFE. After a
reasonable start, the rate of inspection dropped to two a day, and Tunner was
faced with a shortage of 35 planes a week on operations in and out of Berlin.
Tunner
was not alone in his concern about the maintenance performed at
Burtonwood. Navy fliers operated under
different maintenance arrangements from the Air Force and naval squadron mechanics
were trained to perform two hundred hour checks. When VR-6 and VR-8 joined the
airlift, they were directed that they could no longer do so. Navy R5D’s, like the Air Force C54's, would
go to Burtonwood for maintenance work.
When the first one returned, the sailors found that it had so many
uncorrected defects that they issued a new order of their own. Any Navy plane sent to Burtonwood would be
accompanied by the aircraft commander to oversee the work and ensure that it
was done correctly.
Tunner
knew that he could not accept a situation where the airlift would be short 35
planes each week because of slow maintenance work at Burtonwood. He did the only thing that he could. Until the problems at Burtonwood could be
solved, he followed the example of the Navy practice and transferred the
responsibility for the two hundred hour checks back to the squadrons.