History
In April 1923 aircraft of the RAF's Iraq Command flew 280 Sikh troops from Kingarban to Kirkuk in the first British air trooping operation. This operation was only conducted over a short range and it was not until 1929 that the RAF conducted a long-range non-combat air evacuation of British diplomatic staff from Afghanistan to India during the Kabul Airlift.
The world's first long-range combat airlift took place in July 1936. Luftwaffe Ju 52 and Italian Air Force Savoia-Marchetti SM.81 were used by the Spanish Nationalists to transport troops from Spanish Morocco to Spain at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.
Airlifts became practical during World War II as aircraft became large and sophisticated enough to handle large cargo demands. The USAAF began the largest and longest-sustained airlift of the war in May 1942, delivering more than half a million net tons of materiel from India to China over the Hump by November 1945. That operation by the Air Transport Command presaged the even larger Berlin airlift, lasting from June 1948 to September 1949, an American, British and French operation intended to thwart the blockading of the city of Berlin by the Soviet Union. The largest civilian airlift ever was carried out by Protestant and Catholic churches working together under the banner "Joint Church Aid"(JCA) to carry food to Biafra, during the Biafran secession war from Nigeria in 1967-70. This joint effort (which those involved used to call "Jesus Christ Airlines" as an inside joke from the initials JCA) is estimated to have saved more than a million lives in Biafra. All airplanes departed from the (by then) Portuguese colony of St. Tome and Principe and used to fly by night, all lights off and avoiding Nigerian Migs to the bush landing strip of Uli, made by enlarging a common road, the only operational "airport" in Biafra. All the airplanes, crews and logistics were paid, set up and maintained by the joint churches. Joint Churches and their crews and aircraft (mostly aging multiprop airliners like DC-7's, Lockheed Constellation and Superconstellations, DC-6's, even some DC3) kept flying into Biafra at the cost of many crews lives.
Read more about this topic: Airlift
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