The decades of Halvorsen’s post-retirement life brought a series of honors that tracked both his celebrity and the sustained importance of the Berlin Airlift in American and German memory.
The 1949 Cheney Award was the first formal recognition. The Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, presented in 1974, marked the esteem in which the West German government held his contribution. In 1998, he received the Eric Warburg Preis, an award presented by the American Council on Germany recognizing contributions to German-American relations.
In 2001 he was inducted into both the Airlift/Tanker Association Hall of Fame and the Utah Aviation Hall of Fame. In 2008 he served as Grand Marshal of the German-American Steuben Parade in New York City. The parade, an annual celebration of German-American heritage, was an unusual venue for an Air Force colonel, but Halvorsen occupied a unique position in the relationship between the two countries.
The Congressional Gold Medal, one of the highest civilian honors the United States Congress can award, was presented to Halvorsen in 2014. The Gold Medal had previously been awarded to individuals including Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela, and the Tuskegee Airmen. By this point Halvorsen was ninety-three years old.
German institutions also honored him in ways that were simultaneously personal and official. A secondary school in Berlin was named after him. An elementary school at Rhein-Main Air Base, the American base from which many airlift flights had departed, also bore his name. The Air Force created the Col. Gail Halvorsen Award for logistics excellence, naming a professional recognition after a man whose most celebrated contribution was dropping candy from a cargo plane.