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Aviation History
1948
1948 - 1672.PDF
43° FLIGHT K.I. \. to BERLIN. . take-off time for a York, he said, is 40 minutes by day and a few minutes longer by night. Minor technical snags are fixed while ah aircraft is unloading, and if major rectification is necessary—which is unusual—the machine is quickly pulled out of line. G/C. Yarde found time to conduct us personally to the control tower and to introduce us to S/L. P. F. Varey, Senior R.A.F. Controller, whose temporarily stiff arm, we were assured, was the result of a mosquito bite and not controller's elbow. The principal facilities provided in Gatow tower are V.H.F. Approach Control and V.H.F. Airfield Control (Universal Airfield Control). Equipment includes a Eureka beacon (in addition to a similar beacon at Frohnau), Babs, M.F. beacon, H.F./D.F. and V.H.F./D.F. The R/T operators record all traffic between Control and aircraft, and the G.C.A. director and talk-down frequencies are monitored. All V.H.F, equipment used for the facilities mentioned is duplicated, and a change from one set of apparatus to the other is made every 12 hours. Two Air Traffic Control Assistants and special-duty Clerks record every air movement in and out of Gatow, for reporting to the Berlin Air Safety Centre in the Allied Control Authority. A Tower watch consists of three Air Traffic Control Officers, each of whom is trained in the alternative func- tions of Approach Controller, Universal Airfield Controller and Supervisor, and it is the practice, every five or six hours, to interchange jobs, thereby minimizing boredom. The entire watch works as a team, so that sill R/T patter is familiar. Special procedure is necessary for controlling the Ameri- can aircraft. As soon as the first machine of a Skymaster block in the Gatow pipeline calls at a 20-mile check-point, control is handed over by the R.A.F. to the U.S. approach controllers, and as each aircraft reports over the Frohnau beacon it is taken over by British airfield control. A few French Dakotas are using Gatow, and a French warrant officer is available for tower duty. Control has been greatly facilitated by the use of standardized R/T patter and pro- cedure introduced by W/C. Piper, in which all unneces- sary verbiage is eliminated. Chatting with S/L. Varey, we witnessed three take-offs and one landing in two minutes. The time was 11.00 hrs. Since 02.00 hrs. 155 landings had been logged, with ap- proximately the same number of take-offs. During August there were 8,951 landings and 8,917 take-offs and in one night thirty-three G.C.A. landings were recorded. From Control we saw the vast airfield constructional work in hand at Gatow and watched half-a-dozen Yaks gambolling in the direction of Staaken. Out on the airfield once more, officers of a detachment of an Airfield Construction Wing, under S/L. Jennings, told us how rubble is being collected from the bombed areas of Berlin, laid at Gatow, and surfaced with macadam —likewise ripped from the streets of devastated areas, and '' cooked up'' with a 5 per cent admixture of tar and bitumens to give body. The hard-standing now being laid is some 74,000 sq yd in area—greater than the average 1,500-yd runway. All laying is done by hand, by corps of Germans, many of whom live in the Russian sector, with numbers of women among them, working 12 hours a day. Another undertaking is the building of a link track ; U.S.A.F. Skymasttrs stream nose-to-tail round the taxi track.
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