05-29-2009, 09:22 PM
I think it is interesting that sometime during the 1960's or 1970's, I think when LBJ was president, but I'm not sure, the government decided that we did not need ships to transport war materials any longer. We could fly everything in with jumbo jets. Then we needed to resupply Israel after one of their wars in the mid 1980's. It took over 60 days, if I remember correctly, to do the job. The problem was not that we couldn't fly everything in, it was that we could not get the planes on the ground, unloaded, and back in the air quickly enough. We ended up with a backlog of planes "flying the pattern" waiting for landing space. Sea Land was replacing their steam powered SL-7 ships with more economical but slower diesel ships. The government bought the SL-7's, retrofitted them with ramps to convert them into roll-on/roll-off operation and put them in service with the Navy. One SL-7 could haul as much tonnage as all of the aircraft flew into Israel in 60 days in one load and get it anywhere in the world and unloaded in less the 20 days! You would have thought we would have learned something from the Berlin Air lift in the early 1950's!