The foundation continued operating after Halvorsen’s death in February 2022. It represents one of several forms in which his story has been institutionalized: the schools named after him in Berlin, the Air Force award bearing his name, the Provo Vet Center renamed in his honor. Each institution is a form of remembering that is different from individual memory, more durable and less specific. What it preserves is a simplified version of the story, necessarily reduced from the complexity of seven months over Tempelhof and the decades of reunions that followed.
## A Final Return
Halvorsen’s last flight, as noted by family members and by the Berlin Airlift Historical Foundation, took place on December 17, 2019. He was ninety-nine years old. The flight was in a restored aircraft with the foundation, part of a continued effort to maintain the material and experiential connection to the airlift’s history.
He had recovered from COVID-19 in early 2021, at age 100. He continued to give short interviews and participate in commemorative activities during 2021, though his physical condition limited what he could do. He died on February 16, 2022, in Provo, Utah.
The KC-135R tanker that flew over his funeral at Provo City Cemetery was a machine of an entirely different generation from the C-54 Skymaster he had flown into Tempelhof. The C-54 was a piston-engine transport whose design dated to the 1930s. The KC-135R was a jet aircraft designed in the 1950s and built in quantity in the 1960s, still in service in the twenty-first century. The gap between them was not merely technological; it marked the difference between the world in which Halvorsen had performed his most celebrated act and the world in which it was commemorated.