PrintJuly 24, 2008
The audacity of fiction
Before adoring throngs in Berlin and the entire world's media, Barack Obama stated that "many planes were forced to turn back" from the Berlin Airlift because of the bad weather. Great imagery, but contrafactual.
Obama should have read my book before making his claim about the Berlin Airlift. Barely a handful of the nearly 28,000 flights "turned back" in the face of the cruel winter of 1948-1949.
Obama obviously has limited knowledge of the Airlift, and automatically assumes that the USAF would send up aircraft in prohibitively dangerous weather (it didn't) and that, once up, large numbers of pilots aborted their missions.
Ironically, just last month I contributed to an article in the German publication Flugzeug Classic on the US aircraft that went down in the Soviet Zone.
Update: Obama made up something even worse.
Obama should have read my book before making his claim about the Berlin Airlift. Barely a handful of the nearly 28,000 flights "turned back" in the face of the cruel winter of 1948-1949.
Obama obviously has limited knowledge of the Airlift, and automatically assumes that the USAF would send up aircraft in prohibitively dangerous weather (it didn't) and that, once up, large numbers of pilots aborted their missions.
Ironically, just last month I contributed to an article in the German publication Flugzeug Classic on the US aircraft that went down in the Soviet Zone.
Update: Obama made up something even worse.
