Description

Maybe Airlines T-Shirt

This T-shirt was made available in the U.N. post exchange at the Sarajevo Airport during the humanitarian airlift between 1994-96. The airlift was crucial for supplying Bosnians with humanitarian aid during the War in the Balkans. The actual airlift began in 1992 and lasted through 1996. It involved 21 countries flying 12,886 sorties, delivering 159,622 tons of food, medicine and supplies. They also transported 1300 wounded people. It became the longest running humanitarian airlift in history.

The flights were controlled by the U.N. NorMovCon team, a Norwegian U.N. contingent that worked with the French U.N. troops at the Sarajevo Airport to control flight manifests. They also provided the unique “Maybe Airline” passport stamps that were coveted by passengers using the airlift. The name “Maybe Airlines” was coined by passengers, ground crews, pilots and controllers who ran the flights but never knew definitively the status of a flight.

Sometimes flights were canceled because gunfire was targeting aircraft near the airport, or sometimes fog or bad weather closed the airport to trips. There were so many variables that journalists and other passengers had to overcome to obtain a ride on a humanitarian flight that the answer the NorMovCon team would give to perspective passengers was “Maybe?”. The word was heard so often, the service became known as Maybe Airlines.