Gunfire in the Sky

Out of a clear blue sky one day last week two Soviet MIG-15 jet fighters dived on an Air France passenger plane flying above scattered clouds between Frankfurt and Berlin. The MIGs let fly with cannon and machine guns, hitting the wings and a propeller and piercing one of the gas tanks of the DC-4. One cannon shell exploded inside, where the eleven passengers aboard the 54-seat plane had been ordered to lie flat in the aisles. Two of them were seriously wounded. The U.S.-trained French pilot, Gilbert Schwallinger, dived his plane 4,500 ft. into a handy cloud bank, smartly cloud-hopped to Berlin's Tempelhof airdrome where he landed only a few minutes off schedule. "I got the impression they were rather out to kill passengers than to shoot the plane down," said Pilot Schwallinger. "They constantly fired into the cabin." All flights were canceled for four hours, while the allies waited to see whether another incident was in the making which might lead to a second Berlin airlift. A blistering protest by the French, British and U.S. commanders in Berlin produced the Soviet counterprotest that Pilot Schwallinger had been 15 miles off the 20-mile-wide international air corridor and "flying in the direction of Leipzig." But the allies knew this to be a plain lie since the Air France plane had been observed, correctly on course, in the U.S. Air Force radar scope at Fulda at the time of the attack. The incident might have been the work of trigger-happy Russian flyers, but more likely was a piece of calculated Soviet saber-rattling. The allies, calling the attack "contrary to all standards of civilized behavior," demanded punishment of the Red pilots. Berliners were mystified by the incident, and a little anxious, but not panicky; in the front lines of the cold war, they have learned not to lose sleep over dangers that are still in the future. Soon, allied commercial planes were once again routinely making their no daily flights in & out of Tempelhof.

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