Berlin Gets a (Fairly) New Airport

It finally happened on the last day of October 2020 (Halloween!). It was a long wait, but despite scandals, false starts, huge budget overruns, and a major black mark against vaunted German efficiency, Berlin Brandenburg Airport opened its doors at last to Fluggäste (air passengers) on 31 October 2020. Of course, in the age of Covid-19, it was a very scaled back affair compared to the original grand, red-carpet opening to which dignitaries had received invitations, styled as boarding cards, back in June 2012 – delayed almost a year following the original missed 2011 deadline for opening the BER terminal. But the full time between when construction began and the terminal opened was 14 years!

Berlin Brandenburg Airport (BER) opened in November 2020 after many years of delay. PHOTO: Arne Müseler – www.arne-mueseler.com (Wikimedia Commons)

Berlin Brandenburg Airport (BER)

A postcard with a play on the words of Walter Ulbricht, first uttered in 1961, when he falsely claimed that “no one has any intention of constructing a wall,” only months before the Berlin Wall was built. In this case: “No one has any intention of opening an airport.” IMAGE: www.skoko.de / picture alliance / Günter Bratke

Construction of what was billed as Berlin’s new “airport for the 21st century” began in 2006, with a scheduled opening in October 2011. In December 2009, the decision was made to honor Willy Brandt by adding his name to the airport. Brandt was a former West Berlin mayor (1957-1966), West German chancellor (1969-1974), and the Nobel Peace laureate of 1971. Thus the full, official name: Flughafen Berlin Brandenburg “Willy Brandt“ (IATA code: BER).

Originally the new airport’s name was supposed to be Berlin Brandenburg International, with the abbreviation BBI. But somehow the planners had missed the fact that the IATA code BBI was already in use – by the Biju Patnaik International Airport (aka Bhubaneswar Airport) in India. As the planned opening date of 2 June 2012 drew ever nearer, the FBB board finally rebranded BBI as BER. Of course the planned 2012 elaborate opening turned into a major debacle, getting cancelled at the last minute, and infuriating the airlines that had already issued tickets with the BER code on them. (My wife and I had two of those BER tickets, but we landed at TXL.) Caught off guard just before they were supposed to move all operations from TXL to BER, the sudden cancellation cost the airlines a lot of money. Air Berlin, Germany’s largest airline at the time, and set to become BER’s major hub airline, eventually went bankrupt in 2017, five years after the botched 2012 opening.

By the time BER’s new main Terminal 1 opened to air travelers in November 2020, the building was already dated and showing signs that it was at least eight years old, depending on how you calculate it. (The design plans are now at least 14 years old. Terminal 2, a last-minute, low-cost addition to cope with BER’s capacity problem, was planned to open in 2020, but because of the drop in air traffic due to the pandemic, its opening was pushed back to 2021.) Yes, the new terminal is a vast improvement over Tegel’s design from the 1970s. Unlike Tegel, there is a new rail terminal connecting Berlin Brandenburg Airport with Berlin’s center and the Central Rail Station (Hauptbahnhof), even if there is no up escalator for passengers headed for the air terminal from the underground rail station. Cost-cutting means people with baby carriages and luggage must instead use an elevator.

Inside Berlin Brandenburg Airport’s Terminal 1, with its “Red Carpet” artwork. PHOTO: Arne Müseler – www.arne-mueseler.com (Wikimedia Commons)

The technology in the semi-new terminal is also a bit behind the times. When construction began on BER in 2006, the first iPhone was still a year away from being released! The revolutionary iPhone (3G) debuted on 29 June 2007. In 2006, Twitter went online for the first time (in March), and Facebook was only two years old (February 2004). Mark Zuckerberg’s creation would not have 100 million users until 2008. Facebook wouldn’t hit one billion users until 2012. The digital monitors and other tech features in Terminal 1, such as the self-check-in kiosks that did not exist in 2006, can be updated, but why was there no planning for that during the recent delay?

That may have to do with BER’s basic major problem: letting politicians run a complex project for which they have no expertise. I’ll spare you the gritty details, but the same architectural firm (gmp) that designed much-loved Tegel Airport also designed the less-loved Berlin Brandenburg Airport, meaning that most of the blame may lie elsewhere. Some have blamed gmp, but the lead architect, Meinhard von Gerkan, wrote an entire book making a case for the politicians and poor management being the chief culprits.

I suspect that BER eventually will be like I.M. Pei’s Louvre glass pyramid in Paris: unpopular at first, very popular later. While not quite attaining the I.M. Pei level of architectural design, BER’s Terminal 1 intentionally reflects the flat-roofed, steel-and-glass Bauhaus style of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Its transparent airiness is pretty much the opposite of Meinhard von Gerkan’s hexagonal bunker style Tegel terminal that opened in 1975, remarkable since Gerkan designed both terminals.

Tegel Airport (TXL)

Tegel was the “little airport that could” (“der kleine blaue Flughafen” in German*). Designed for West Berlin in the 1970s, when the city was still an isolated land island surrounded by East Germany, the Tegel terminal that opened in 1975 was about the size of your typical medium-sized city airport in the United States. In 2019, the year before it closed, Tegel’s “Otto Lilienthal” terminal was handling over 24 million passengers. And that’s not counting the 11.4 million passengers that used Berlin’s Schönefeld Airport (mostly easyJet and Ryanair), which is now Terminal 5 at BER.

To me Tegel was like a suitcase that’s too small for what you need to pack.

An interior view of the main hall of Tegel’s Terminal B in 2019. PHOTO: Arne Müseler (Wikimedia Commons)

The nostalgia for Tegel that one sees today is understandable when you realize how many tourists, business travelers, and Berliners have passed through its gates over the past 45 years. I’m one of them. You may be also. Many appreciated Tegel’s design for the very short distance from curbside to check-in. Arrival put you immediately into a crowded luggage claim space. But the tiny public toilets, narrow halls, and limited shopping were not attractive features. To me Tegel was like a suitcase that’s too small for what you need to pack. Tegel was a small town airport that was forced to serve a metropolis, and got pushed far beyond its capacity. Anyone who ever flew from TXL to Munich (MUC) knows the shock of flying from a dinky, outdated TXL terminal, and arriving at the modern, world-class MUC terminal. The contrast was stark, especially when you consider that Munich has a population of 1.5 million compared to Berlin’s 3.7 million. (Each city has about 6 million in their metro regions.)

I previously wrote about how Berlin is a metropolis that refuses to grow up and doesn’t know what it wants to be if it ever does. Tegel was a symptom of Berlin’s “poor but sexy” neurosis. Berlin simply refused to acknowledge that the clock ran out for Tegel many years ago. Even with its later awkward add-on terminals, Tegel was barely functional. I remember waiting for a vacation flight to Tenerife with Berlin friends in a Tegel satellite terminal that had all the charm of a warehouse. And even after many decades, the penny-pinching Berlin government refused to construct the planned second hexagon that would have doubled TXL’s terminal capacity. The only public transport was the TXL/X9 bus. No rail at all, ever – in a city that otherwise has pretty good commuter rail transport. No, I for one will not miss Tegel.

An Accident of History
But TXL does have an interesting history. As with many things in Berlin, the Tegel airfield was an accident of history. The forested land that Tegel Airport now stands on was once used for hunting by Prussian nobility. Later the area served as an artillery firing range. Its aviation history began in the early 1900s, when the Royal Prussian Airship battalion was based there and established the Luftschiffhafen Reinickendorf (Reinickendorf Airship Port). In the early 1930s the flat terrain became Raketenschießplatz Tegel, a testing field used by the first German rocket pioneers, including Wernher von Braun, who would later move his rocket testing program to the more isolated Peenemünde in 1937. Commemorative relief portraits of three German rocket pioneers – Rudolf Nebel, Hermann Oberth, and von Braun – can be found in Tegel’s main terminal hall.

Following World War II, the area was considered a prime location for allotment gardens (Kleingärten/Schrebergärten), but Joseph Stalin’s Berlin Blockade began on 24 June 1948. In response US President Truman countered the Soviet bluff by ordering that West Berlin be supplied by aircraft using the three Allied air corridors. With the start of the Berlin Airlift, it soon became obvious that Berlin’s main Tempelhof Airport could not accommodate all the aircraft and flights required.

Tegel was in the French Zone. The French military authorities began construction of a 2,428 m (7,966 ft) long runway, the longest in Europe at the time. The project included the construction of temporary airport buildings and basic support infrastructure. In a tribute to French efficiency, exactly 90 days after groundbreaking, a US Air Force Douglas C-54 Skymaster touched down on the new airport’s runway on 5 November 1948. Soon regular cargo flights by American, British, and French military aircraft were landing and taking off at Tegel as part of the airlift.

The first Lufthansa aircraft to land at Tegel Airport (TXL) on 28 October 1990, just under a month after German reunification, was greeted with great fanfare. Three decades later a Lufthansa jet would be the first scheduled aircraft to land at BER, following the closing of TXL. PHOTO: Lufthansa via Twitter

Tegel Airport did not receive its first commercial airline flight until January 1960. That was when Air France moved its Berlin operations from Tempelhof to Tegel. With the advent of larger passenger jets, Tempelhof’s runways were too short to handle the newer airplanes. Pan American (Pan Am) joined Air France at Tegel in May 1964, offering three direct flights per week year-round to New York JFK (with Boeing 707s or Douglas DC-8s). By the terms of the postwar Allied agreement, only American, British, and French airlines could fly into and out of West Berlin. Germany’s Lufthansa was not allowed to fly through East German airspace. The first Lufthansa flight to land at TXL (an Airbus A310-300 jet named “Donaueschingen”) was greeted with great fanfare on 28 October 1990. (See photo above.) Tempelhof Airport shut down in 2008 and its former airfield is now a popular park.

Tegel Airport (TXL) in Berlin with its main “Otto Lilienthal” terminal and control tower in 2011. PHOTO: Hans Knips (Wikimedia Commons)

Tegel Airport kept its makeshift terminal for almost 15 years, up until the 1975 opening of the brand new Tegel “Otto Lilienthal” terminal (photo above). Berlin’s second airport, the outdated, dilapidated Schönefeld terminal that once served as East Berlin’s main airport, has now been incorporated into BER as Terminal 5 with a bit of sprucing up. It’s not a very elegant solution. Passengers have to leave and reenter security in order to move between Terminal 1 and Terminal 5 – yet another failure of planning by Berlin’s politicians, especially allowing for the eight-year delay since the failed 2012 opening. Terminal 5 is supposed to close, if and when the planned Terminal 3 is completed some time in the 2020s. Before it became part of BER, Schönefeld had the dubious honor of being rated as the world’s worst international airport (2017) and Germany’s worst airport (2018).

Schönefeld’s old SXF code has now been retired along with TXL. Although Tegel had its last commercial scheduled flight on 8 November 2020, for legal reasons TXL will not be officially decommissioned as an airfield until after a six-month transitional period that ends on 3 May 2021. A Bundeswehr (armed forces) helicopter landing pad on the north side of the Tegel runway will remain in use for German government officials until 2029, the scheduled date for the completion of a special new government airport terminal at BER.

No, I won’t miss Tegel. Feel free to feel nostalgic about TXL, but I prefer to look forward to a new big-city Berlin airport that will no doubt have to adapt and grow, just as any airport does. The pandemic has given BER some breathing room for now. The clock finally ran out for Tegel, but it has only begun for Berlin Brandenburg Airport.

– HF

* “The Little Engine That Could” is an American folktale that has appeared in several illustrated children’s books and films. In German the book is known as Die kleine blaue Lokomotive, taking a cue from the English version, in which the little railroad locomotive (“I think I can, I think I can.”) is described as blue.