1701st Air Transport Wing
military unit
The 1701st Air Transport Wing is a discontinued United States Air Force unit. It was last assigned to Continental Division, Military Air Transport Service (MATS) at Great Falls Air Force Base, Montana, where it was discontinued on 1 May 1953. The wing was formed as the 517th Air Transport Wing in 1948, when MATS replaced Air Transport Command and Naval Air Transport Service and reorganized its units under the wing base organization. The wing trained MATS aircrews, most notably for the Berlin Airlift. MATS training operations moved to Palm Beach Air Force Base in the early 1950s and the wing was discontinued when Great Falls was turned over to MATS' Air Resupply and Communications Service.
History
The 517th Air Transport Wing was organized at Great Falls Air Force Base in June 1948, when Military Air Transport Service (MATS) replaced Air Transport Command (ATC) and Naval Air Transport Service and reorganized its Air Force elements under the wing-base organization system. The new wing assumed the personnel and equipment of the 1455th AF Base Unit (Air Transport) of ATC and continued its mission of training aircrews for airlift units.
On 25 June 1948 Operation Vittles, the strategic airlift of supplies to Berlin's 2,000,000 inhabitants, was initiated. The 517th (later 1701st) played a critical role in assuring the success of this vital operation. Officials selected Great Falls as the only replacement aircrew training site for Berlin Airlift-bound C-54s.
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This entry incorporates text from “1701st Air Transport Wing” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.