The fortieth anniversary, in 1989, was timed dramatically. It coincided with the late months of the Cold War, months before the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989. Halvorsen attended the commemoration in a city that was still divided, still carrying the Wall through its center. The Wall would be gone within a few months. The commemorations of the airlift acquired a new context as a result: not simply remembering an old crisis but observing the final years of the division it had helped shape.
In 1993 and 1994, Halvorsen re-enacted candy drops, returning to Tempelhof on aircraft that made passes over the airport and dropped candy-laden parachutes as the original drops had been made. The re-enactments were theatrical but not empty: they connected specific people who had been children in 1948 with the event that had marked them. Some of the children who had caught parachutes in 1948 were present, now middle-aged.
In 1998, for the airlift’s fiftieth anniversary, Halvorsen flew with the Berlin Airlift Historical Foundation aboard a restored C-54 aircraft called the “Spirit of Freedom.” The foundation had acquired and restored a C-54 Skymaster of the type Halvorsen had flown in 1948, and the aircraft made a 71-day European tour that included Berlin. Halvorsen was seventy-seven years old. He flew the aircraft himself, and by his later account, the experience of returning to Tempelhof in the same type of plane he had flown fifty years earlier was one of the most meaningful events of his later life. His last flight occurred on December 17, 2019, when he was ninety-nine years old.