Tunner understood that the airlift’s bottleneck was not in the sky but on the ground. Aircraft were spending too long at Tempelhof being unloaded, refueled, and turned around. Tunner’s team compressed the turnaround time at Berlin from sixty minutes to thirty minutes. At western German bases, they cut refueling time from thirty-three minutes to eight minutes. Ground unloading at Tempelhof dropped from seventeen minutes to five. These were not small improvements. Multiplied across hundreds of flights per day, they translated directly into more tons delivered.
Tunner also standardized procedures in the air. Rather than stacking planes in holding patterns waiting for a landing slot, Tunner adopted a one-way system: a plane that missed its approach window turned around and flew back to its departure base, then rejoined the queue. The system reduced the risk of mid-air collision and kept the pipeline moving. By October 1948 the American and British airlift operations were merged under a single Combined Airlift Task Force, with Tunner in command and RAF Air Commodore John W.F. Merer as his deputy.
The fleet grew steadily. By January 15, 1949, American aircraft in the airlift included 225 C-54s and 24 Navy R-5D transports, for a total of 249 American aircraft. The British had 147 aircraft of their own. Some specialized aircraft appeared for particular cargoes. Five C-82 Packets joined in fall 1948 to carry wide-bodied cargo that wouldn’t fit in a C-54. A single C-74 Globemaster, the largest American transport of the era with a 25-ton payload, flew as the operation’s long-haul aircraft.