From 4 July 1992 German Transalls joined the international airlift that kept besieged Sarajevo supplied during the Bosnian war. It was the Luftwaffe’s longest humanitarian operation and, for many crews, their first experience of being shot at. In September 1992 an Italian Air Force G.222 was shot down on approach to Sarajevo, and the German aircraft were hastily fitted with Kevlar armour around the cockpit and missile countermeasures. Crews developed a steep, tight descent from altitude, later known simply as the Sarajevo approach, to reduce their time within range of guns and shoulder-launched missiles.

German records cited by the historian Ahrens count 277 incidents during the German participation, 205 judged hostile, with up to 22 in a single month. Alongside the Sarajevo landings, Transalls flew night airdrops of food over enclaves such as Srebrenica. French C-160s flew the same routes. The experience reshaped the German fleet: a permanent self-protection suite with the AN/AAR-54 missile warning system, operated by a tactical systems officer in the former radio operator’s seat, became standard for aircraft sent into danger, from the Balkans to Afghanistan.

Africa defined the Transall’s career. In April 1976 twelve French C-160s airlifted Moroccan troops and equipment to Zaïre in Operation Verveine, and in May 1978 French Transalls dropped Foreign Legion paratroopers over Kolwezi during the hostage rescue there. French C-160s, and later the tanker NGs, sustained French bases and interventions across sub-Saharan Africa for decades, through Chad and on to Operation Serval in Mali in 2013, where German Transalls also flew in support.

For the Luftwaffe, Africa meant relief work. In 1974–75 aircraft of Air Transport Wing 63 flew aid into Ethiopia, Sudan and Chad, and ten years later they returned for the Ethiopian famine of 1984–85. There crews perfected what German airmen called the Afrika-Verfahren: sacks of grain dropped without parachutes from about 20 ft, the aircraft flown nose-high so the load slid out over the open ramp. Further missions followed in Mauritania, Mali and Niger, to Somalia in 1993, to Mozambique’s floods in 2000 and to the Congo in 2003.

• V1–V3: prototypes built by Nord, VFW and HFB, first flown 1963–64.
• C-160A: six stretched pre-production aircraft.
• C-160D: 110 for the Luftwaffe; 20 went to Turkey in 1971 as the C-160T.
• C-160F: 50 for the French Air Force; four converted to C-160P night mail aircraft flown in Air France colours for the French postal service.
• C-160Z: nine for the South African Air Force.
• C-160NG: second-generation French aircraft from 1981 with an extra wing tank, refuelling probe and new avionics; about half could act as tankers.
• C-160R: French F and NG aircraft upgraded from 1994 with new avionics and countermeasures.
• C-160G Gabriel: two signals intelligence aircraft, introduced in 1989, replacing Noratlas Gabriels; one flew in the 1991 Gulf War.
• C-160H Astarté: four NGs converted as airborne relay stations to communicate with France’s submerged ballistic missile submarines, 1988 to 2001.

Because the Airbus A400M arrived years late, the Transall had to fly much longer than planned. Germany ran a series of life extension programmes known as LEDA: LEDA I and II from 1984 focused on the wings, and LEDA III in the 1990s raised the structural life from 8,000 to 12,000 flights and added new avionics and a self-protection system. By 1999 about 2,000 modifications had been incorporated across the fleet, according to a NATO technical paper by P. Blumschein. France upgraded all its aircraft to C-160R standard between 1994 and 1999 and in 2009 announced a further modernisation to keep them flying.

Those programmes, plus GPS, laser inertial navigation, Kevlar armour, missile warning and collision avoidance systems, kept the type useful but made it expensive to run in its final decade. In 2015 Germany pushed the retirement date back from 2018 to 2021, keeping a shrinking group of protected aircraft for missions that needed their self-defence suite.